Good Analysis of Microsoft’s New Blog Policy from PC Pro
Microsoft’s new policy regarding international blogs and compliance with host country laws goes further down the path of protecting individual rights than its competitors, says PC Pro.
Microsoft “Chief Blogging Officer” Robert Scoble is certainly happy about the new policy. In his post yesterday, he directed his thanks to Rebecca McKinnon, a respected journalist-turned-blogger who has been covering the story. For her part, McKinnon said that Microsoft’s policy took, “laudable steps toward greater accountability, transparency and respect for the user.”
The incident that provoked all this happened about a month ago when Microsoft took down the blog of New York Times researcher and dissident blogger Zhao Jing at the behest of the Chinese government. Scoble had some choice words about the incident at the time: “Guys over at MSN: sorry, I don’t agree with your being used as a state-run thug.”
The PC Pro article also raised another issue worth discussing: Google. It’s well known that Google blocks certain results from searches made from within China, and this has, “landed Google… in hot political water. Not least because Google has made statements about the way it does business that are political and ethical; among them that ‘information knows no borders’, and that ‘you can make money without doing evil’.”
I wonder if the competition between Google and Microsoft will spark a new policy from Google’s end any time soon.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
To harnass and monetize disruptive technologies and continual innnovations, like Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Apple, Google, Amazon, and many others have is to be built into any forecast.
I mean: They are giants that could fall, and will suffer some dips, but they are early colossal entrants in what is becoming The Future.
I think Google is a great company to invest in, and I am an Unpaid Opinion Blogger.
While I oppose bowing to any Domination System (Wink, 2005), I also know that increased communication technology results in increased thinking, questioning, debating, activism and struggle against oppressors and deceptions.
P.S. Chinese bloggers already have sophisticated anonymous code blogging protocols and methodology. We in the West could learn something fitting for business by studing international dissident blogging, the real future blogology of underground network communications against Domination Systems.
The mind war is occuring in the blogosphere.
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