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STATE OF THE NATION REPORT (forthcoming)
ARMENIA’S 2008 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
PFA PROSPECTUS
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| HOME > BLOGS > Communication and Behavioral Sciences |
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Communication and Behavioral Sciences
Referring to this article published in weekly Standard I would like to open a discussion on Internet accessibility in Armenia as well as the level of Internet censorship there. I have not met many people living in Armenia who would even think of them being censored by the government and being deprived of information.
“Google's strategy in China, from early 2000 onwards, was to build a Chinese language version of its search engine that would mirror the content on the English language google.com. But on September 3, 2002, the Chinese government, deploying the so-called Great Firewall of China, shut down the Chinese language version of google.com because domestic Chinese Internet users had been using the uncensored search engine to access forbidden websites. The company was faced with a joint ethical and business dilemma. It could either negotiate a compromise with the Chinese government or effectively cede the Chinese market to local search engine Baidu. Brin, Page, and company CEO Eric Schmidt chose to do business with the authorities in Beijing and build a "customized solution" for the China market. More... ...
In December 2005, Google signed a deal with the Chinese government that enabled the company to establish a legal presence in China. On January 27 of this year, the newly-engineered search engine "google.cn" launched. In contrast with the original Google Chinese language site in China (which continued to hobble along, ever vulnerable to the capricious whims of the Great Firewall), google.cn is censored. The Google engineers added an algorithm which replicated the ideological desires of the authorities in Beijing. As Clive Johnson explained in a recent New York Times magazine piece about Google in China: Brin's team had one more challenge to confront: how to determine which sites to block? The Chinese government wouldn't give them a list. So Google's engineers hit on a high-tech solution. They set up a computer inside China and programmed it to try to access Web sites outside the country, one after another. If a site was blocked by the firewall, it meant the government regarded it as illicit--so it became part of Google's blacklist.
Google chose to mimic the Great Firewall. Everything that the Chinese government blocks, Google also blocks. Sensitive links, to Falun Gong, Tibetan opposition, or Tiananmen Square commemoration sites, no longer appear--instead, google.cn informs its users that the requested information is not available due to Chinese law. The presence of this information is, therefore, defined by its absence, by its holes rather than its wholeness. It's a scheme which might have been imagined by Kafka or Orwell.”
You can read the original article here:
www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/176wtlbv.asp
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