Playing the censorship card might not have been Google’s smartest move

There is no doubt that the action taken by Google in its relations with China is something that we will be talking about for sometime and as well historians will probably write boring dissertations of the act itself and the fallout that is on just beginning to surface.

I still stand by my original assumption in that this move by Google has absolutely nothing to do with censorship no matter how much the tech and social media worlds want it to. Yesterday Duncan talked about the hacking aspect of it all and while I believe we both agree it is more about the hacking than censorship we have differing opinions about which aspect of the hacking has been the driving force.

There’s a big problem thought with falling in line with the Kool-Aid reaction to Google’s claims it is all about them suddenly finding their soul and as such it was no long palatable for them to stay in China. Well at least it wasn’t for Sergey – Schmidt on the other hand still has no problem with censorship as long as Google can keep making millions.

China isn’t the only country Google is making a fortune in that has censorship laws which the company has no problem agreeing with. You see Google has the same type of agreement with India where they more than willingly block “objectionable content” – well at least content that is objectionable to the Indian government.

And what about the future?

As Michael Masnick points out at Techdirt – what is Google going to do if Australia is successful with their push for their home-brewed Internet censorship laws; which Duncan has talked about here quite a bit. Is Google suddenly going to turn to the Australian government and say see ya later.

Then how about Britain with it’s push for their Digital Economy Bill which has great potential to affect how people in that country use the Internet. Or how about France who is forever trying to shut out the rest of the world in fear that they will lose their identity or something.

By playing the censorship card in China Google is setting a very dangerous precedent for itself that I’m not sure they are going to easily backtrack from without losing a large portion of goodwill that leaving China behind might be bringing them. The problem is that censorship of the Internet isn’t just something happening in one or two places. As Rebecca MacKinnon notes in the Guardian Online

In the past several years, internet censorship has spread rapidly throughout a range of political systems. According to the Open Net Initiative, a consortium of academics and computer scientists who track censorship trends, the number of countries that censor the internet has gone from a handful a decade ago to almost 40 today – and the censorship club’s fastest growing membership segment consists of democracies.

So what is Google going to do now that it’s set the precedent? Are they going to take the same stance with that going number of countries that they have with China?

Not likely and this is why I really believe that the whole censorship angle to this is nothing more than a bullshit cover story. A way to blow smoke up the asses of the digirati and world press while letting China know that enough was enough.

The only problem is – China couldn’t care less.