American businesses that deliver content on the Web all have one very big question mark in common: China. The Chinese government is a big proponent of censorship, in the news and increasingly on the Web. Now it appears that Technorati has run afoul of the state-of-the-art censorship system known as the Great Firewall.
The furor over China has been going on for a while, but it really hit a boiling point in January of this year when Microsoft shut down the MSN Spaces account of a dissident blogger at the behest of the Chinese government. During a particularly contentious House Subcommittee meeting on the issue, California Represenative Tom Lantos told executives from Google, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Yahoo!, “I do not understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night.”
Good times.
So what does all this mean for Technorati? In a nutshell, it means that they’re going to have to do the same thing Google did if they want to become available to the Chinese population again: censor themselves. Either that or as Tom Raftery so aptly put it, all the search engines are going to need to band together to come up with a unified China policy and then stick to it.
{ 0 comments… add one now }