“The Internet is out of control!” For years, this sentence has been the leitmotiv of every government’s opposition to the Web. Politicians don’t like citizens being empowered and actually using their freedom of speech.
Well. Times have changed and now businessmen as well as governments have found ways to control the Internet!
Google vs. China
Sadly enough, Google failed in its struggle against the Chinese government by agreeing to limit its search results to placate Chinese political authorities. To please China, Google used filters commonly referred to as "The Great Firewall of China" on the Chinese version of its search engine, Google.cn, so that results about politically sensitive movements like the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were omitted. After a hacking incident on Google.cn servers that took place in January 2010, Google momentarily reconsidered its obedience to China and decided to stop adhering to censorship practices that benefited the Chinese authorities.
Google’s ethical righteousness was short lived. After Google and the Chinese political parties failed to agree on the censorship issue, Google rerouted its censored services to the Google Hong Kong jurisdiction to avoid Chinese authorities. As of today, "The Great Firewall" continues to censor search results from its Hong Kong platform, Google.com.hk. As such, Google may have saved its market with billions of users, but it has simultaneously complied with a dictatorship and robbed the same billions of people of access to the truth.
Naguib Sawiris and other recent blogging censorship
China isn’t the only dictatorship winning on the Web. For months I’ve witnessed blogs being censored or simply shut down in the so-called free world. Why? Because governments and businessmen simply request blogging sites to do so, and the websites obey. The same thing that happened to Google in China occurs on a daily basis in the United States and Europe. At the end of the day, blogging sites don’t really care about freedom of speech. It’s only about money drawn from advertising. Websites need corporations to make a living and will choose corporate cash over disseminating the truth any time.
Case and point: a few days ago I noticed the angry post of a blogger whose site had been shut down from Blogster as requested by an Egyptian businessman, Naguib Sawiris. I didn’t know of Sawiris before I noticed this event, and I did my homework to see if the censored site (which had been migrated) was defamatory. There were certainly no friendly posts about Sawiris on the blogger’s site, but the posts were all based on facts and referenced respectable sources. But apparently this wasn’t good enough for Blogster and Sawiris had his way.
This example of online censorship is interesting and struck me because there’s no government power controlling the information this time. Here we just have a businessman who doesn’t like what is written about him and therefore simply deletes it in order to portray himself as a man with no flaws. The same thing has been happening on Naguib Sawiris’ Wikipedia page, which at one point contained a balanced amount of information about the Egyptian billionaire’s involvement in lawsuits and political controversies, and now reads like a PR flyer promoting his gleaming reputation. Over the years we’ve gotten used to political censorship. But business censorship is new. And it’s unacceptable.
This much is clear: we’re not free anymore, if we ever were, to say what we want on the Internet.
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