Bill Gates has come out and offered support for China's recent internet actions, but managed to do it without criticising Google by name.
Appearing on the TV show Good Morning America, Gates was asked about the dispute between China and Google which arose when the search giant threatened to stop censorship of its Chinese site following the hacking of email accounts of human rights activists, which it says was conducted by the Chinese government.
In response, the richest man in the world said: "You've got to decide: Do you want to obey the laws of the countries you're in, or not? If not, you may not end up doing business there."
According to the former head of Microsoft, "the Chinese efforts to censor the internet have been very limited. It's easy to go around it, and so I think keeping the internet thriving there is very important."
Ballmer speaks too
Gates isn't the only Microsoft big cheese playing down Google's cries of foul. Last Friday Steve Ballmer, the company's Chief Executive, implied that Google had overreacted:
"People are always trying to break into other people's data. There's always somebody trying to break into Microsoft."
He said that Redmond could comply with Chinese Net censorship, stating that "if the Chinese government gives us proper legal notice, we'll take that piece of information out of the Bing search engine."
Google's stance on the Chinese issue has made them the darlings of human rights campaigners. But it's definitely not flavour of the month in Beijing, where a government spokesman adamantly told state news agency Xinhua: "Any accusation that the Chinese government participated in cyber attacks, either in an explicit or indirect way, is groundless and aims to denigrate China. We are firmly opposed to that."
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anteaus
January 27th 2010
4. tech89 said: "A company cannot set up business in another country and then expect the rules and laws to change for its own benefit."
No, but we can expect another country to stop performing criminal acts if it wants to trade with us. Remember it's not the filtering that's the issue but the organized and government-sponsored information theft. If they do not stop this, then we have the right to sanction that country by withdrawing all IT services.
If we were to take Gates's argument to its logical conclusion, then we would accept that we don't have the right to stop Somalian pirates from hijacking ships. But, of course we do. This is international crime, and so are China's IT activities.
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georgesu
January 27th 2010
3. Incredible. How is it possible that Gates would show support for the suppression of information and communication for over a billion people. The Chinese cannot use Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, most search engines and (soon) Google. Recently the CCP started censoring cell phone text messages to prevent "sexting". Obviously, they want to prevent political content from spreading by cell phone. Gates should be ashamed. All the Chinese journalists who are either in prison or who live in fear of prison would scold him, but that job is left to the rest of us.
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microsofthater
January 27th 2010
2. @tech89 Doesnt make it right, by your logic what the Nazi's did was ok because it was "law". Google did the right thing.
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tech89
January 26th 2010
1. Gates makes a very good point, A company cannot set up business in another country and then expect the rules and laws to change for its own benefit.
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