We Googlistas want a global debate on information freedom. Why are others so coy?
Four cheers for Google. Risking the loss of potentially huge long-term profits in the Chinese internet market, it has struck a blow for one of the great causes of our time: global information freedom. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that everyone has the right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”. In practice, most people in the world still cannot exercise that right, partly because of crippling poverty and lack of education, but also because governments stop them. There is nothing automatic about the triumph of these wonderful new technologies of communication and information. We (we of this persuasion) celebrate every small victory of digital David over authoritarian Goliath, be it of the mobile phone-using protester in Iran or the VPN-using blogger in China, but Goliath has defended himself quite effectively so far. In real life it may take a Goliath to beat a Goliath. Hence the fascination of “Google vers
