Google and China

Following up on my link to Siva Vaidhyanathan’s UVA Law course on search engines, I noticed that Siva appeared on the most recent episode of the This Week in Google podcast (#25). The discussion about Google and China comes in the first half, with the Nexus One phone taking up the second half. The question of whether Google should be applauded for threatening China is complex. It seems that they have garnered good PR from this, despite the fact that their servers, including individual Gmail accounts, were inexplicably hacked by the Chinese government. The vulnerability of Google, and the American information infrastructure in general, has been overshadowed in the news by Google’s threat to pull out of China, which has (strangely) been pitched as a human rights issue. Anyway, it’s worth a listen.