Free Speech

I was pleasantly surprised to come across this excellent article in the New York Times: Google's China Problem - and China's Google Problem and felt I had to share it. It talks about the current situation in government censorship of the Internet in China. My personal motivation in reading it, of course, was not any desire to learn about the political situation in China but to find out how Google is doing there and what they are being accused of... I mean, Google seems to be taking over the world, but people don't really have complaints. It's kind of like a benevolent dictatorship, as opposed to, say, a Microsoft Monopoly, which would qualify as something close to despotism. I wake up in the morning and check my GMail, my Orkut scrapbook, my Blogger comments, read Google News, check the weather forecast on my Personalized Homepage, do a quick Google Search or Google Scholar search for some obscure piece of research, update my ToDo list on my Google Desktop bar, .... do I need continue? Your mornings may not be particularly different, either. Now, Google may rule our lives, but we all agree that Google is NOT Evil. Hence my interest in that article. As a bonus, I learnt a lot of things about China I didn't know before.

A poignant excerpt from the article:
"...To take Lee at his word is to take a leap of faith: that the Internet, simply through its own inherent properties, will slowly chip away at the government's ability to control speech, seeding a cultural change that strongly favors democracy. In this view, there will be no "great man" revolution in China, no Lech Walesa rallying his oppressed countrymen. Instead, the freedom fighters will be a half-billion mostly apolitical young Chinese, blogging and chatting about their dates, their favorite bands, video games — an entire generation that is growing up with public speech as a regular habit..."

Cheers,
Prashanth.