Google disappears Tibet

By Michael Fraase

Saturday, 22 April 2006 03:42PM CST

Section: Censorship

Do no evil. That’s Google’s corporate mantra, but it seems to be forgotten these days. Scot Hacker, UC Berkeley’s journalism school’s webmaster, discovered that Google Earth can’t find Tibet. Yeah, yeah, whether or not Tibet is a country is a perennial topic for debate, but it appears on every map and atlas I have. As Hacker points out:

“When we think about Google being in bed with the Chinese government and blocking access to information about Tibet, we know it’s bad, but we also assume the censorship applies only to Google users in China. Here we have an example of Google’s complicity affecting searches conducted from anywhere in the world.”

China invaded Tibet in 1950. That’s historical fact. Whether Google intentionally disappeared Tibet or this is some sort of weird database error remains to be known for sure. Either way Google has some serious explaining to do.

Update: Sunday, 23 April 2006 11:30AM CDT: Clive Thompson, writing “Google’s China Problem (and China’s Google Problem)” in the New York Times magazine offers an excellent backgrounder on the travails of American internet companies doing business in China. When seen from a non-American-centric position, Google can be seen as trying to walk a fine line. One of Thompson’s main sources, Zhao Jing—the Chinese pro-democracy blogger whose weblog was erased by Microsoft at the Chinese government’s request when Zhao called for the boycott of a paper for firing an editor—ranks the three main US companies doing business in China:

“I expected Zhao to be much angrier with the American Internet companies than he was. He was surprisingly philosophical. He ranked the companies in order of ethics, ticking them off with his fingers. Google, he said, was at the top of the pile. It was genuinely improving the quality of Chinese information and trying to do its best within a bad system. Microsoft came next; Zhao was obviously unhappy with its decision, but he said that it had produced such an easy-to-use blogging tool that, on balance, Microsoft was helping Chinese people to speak publicly. Yahoo came last, and Zhao had nothing but venom for the company.

“‘Google has struck a compromise,’ he said, and compromises are sometimes necessary. Yahoo’s behavior, he added, put it in a different category: ‘Yahoo is a sellout. Chinese people hate Yahoo.’ The difference, Zhao said, was that Yahoo had put individual dissidents in serious danger and done so apparently without thinking much about the human damage. (Yahoo did not respond to requests for comment.) Google, by contrast, had avoided introducing any service that could get someone jailed. It was censoring information, but Zhao considered that a sin of omission, rather than of commission.”

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