Dalai Lama, we don't care. But, up in arms over Google?

It is funny how President Obama did not even want to meet with the Dalai Lama, lest our creditor our friend China get all offended.  But, oh, when Google says it experienced cyberattacks from China, the administration jumps up and down.  Yet again showing that money talks and everything else can take a hike.  Including the Dalai Lama!
I like the tongue-in-cheek comment that Hillary Clinton suddenly transformed into Google's Secretary of State :) But, wait, this joke is in Forbes magazine?  How ironic!

Even more hilarious and quite strange is the comment from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer:

in a speech to oil company executives in Houston on Thursday, criticized Google for its threats to leave China after the cyber-attacks, suggesting that Google’s decision to no longer filter out Internet searches objectionable to the Chinese government were an irrational business decision. After all, Ballmer said, the U.S. imports oil from Saudi Arabia despite the censorship that goes on in that country.

There, that is a good logic, and consistent too: We are business folks and we don't care how horrible the regimes are. 

Anyway, there are other countries, too, where Google censors information in order to satisfy the home country:

India: To abide by obscenity laws, Google strips out certain pornographic results from its Indian search pages. It has also removed content from the Indian version of its social networking site, Orkut, that's deemed by the government to be politically incendiary, like one group representing the Hindu nationalist party Shiv Sena.
France and Germany: Their strict ban on hate speech extends to the Web. Google obliges them by blocking search results for extremist groups like the neo-Nazi group Stormfront and the Holocaust denial association AAARGH.
Thailand: Lése-majesté, or insulting the king, is a serious crime in Thailand. Hence Google's agreement to block Thai users from viewing videos on YouTube (owned by Google) that mocked king Bhumibol Adulyadej, including one that showed him with feet on his head, a symbol of degradation to Thai Buddhists.
Turkey: Google has kowtowed to Turkish government demands that it block a handful of YouTube videos that portrayed Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the revered founder of the country, as a homosexual. Turkey has banned YouTube anyway for the past two years in an attempt to persuade Google to remove the Atatürk clips from global distribution.

Google, and Censorship in China

James Fallows observes:

What happens after Google is so roundly cheered for taking so clear a stand? China will still be there; many of its people will hunger for outside information and most will aspire to modernization. What is the way out of this that does the least overall damage to Google and the people who once relied on its services inside China? That is the question taken up here (I have met a number of the Google-China employees shown in the pictures) and the the WSJ editorial as well. As that editorial says:

"it's worth remembering that this is a lose-lose-lose scenario. The most likely outcome is that Google loses access to an important market, Chinese customers lose access to its services, and the government loses face."

The next step is to find some way to reduce the number of losses -- including, yes, for the Chinese government, since (believe me) absolutely no good will come to anyone anywhere from the government's feeling shamed, humiliated, or newly insecure. It is emotionally satisfying to see the Chinese government thrown off balance after its recent repressive moves. That won't make things better for most people in China.

Image ht