In a statement issued on March 22nd 2010, Human Rights Watch said, “Google’s decision to stop censoring its Chinese search engine is a strong step in favour of freedom of expression and information, and an indictment of the Chinese government’s insistence on censorship of the internet…” They continued, “China is one of the world’s largest economies, but hundreds of millions of Chinese internet users are denied the basic access to information that people around the world take for granted, Google’s decision to offer an uncensored search engine is an important step to challenge the Chinese government’s use of censorship to maintain its control over its citizens.”
Extending this, Professor Ross Anderson (University of Cambridge), in an interview discussing liberties and free speech in the digital-age stated, “…[the impact of the internet on liberty and free speech has been] very positive indeed – not so much two steps forward and one step back, as ten steps forward for every step back. By breaking the oligopoly of the established press and letting everyone be a publisher, it has made information much harder for the powerful to control. And the overall picture that’s emerging is that the controls which still work operate more along corporate boundaries than along national boundaries. In order to censor YouTube, for example, countries like Turkey and Pakistan had to block access to the whole site; it’s not practical just to block selected content. And a country that stops its citizens having access to Facebook, say, or Google or Skype, faces real disadvantages – from inward investment to domestic discontent…” Continue reading
