Another One Bites the Dust: GoDaddy Vacates China

Over the course of the past week, two major American Internet Corporations have made the decision to vacate China, Google and GoDaddy. GoDaddy, a web hosting conglomerate made the decision on Wedsnesday, a day after Google's announcement to end their operations in China. Is this a coincidence? Is this news surprising?

In my opinion, this neither a coincidence nor a surprise. GoDaddy and Google are American companies whose mission is to champion the First Amendment to the United States Constitution: Freedom of Speech, which is inextricably linked to the notion of Free Press. In China, like many other authoritarian regimes is famous for their continual denial of free speech. In fact, China's press is among the most controlled agencies in the country, maybe even the world. If there was an award for the most deceitful tabloid, it would be a tie beween the Xinhua state run agency and Iran's IRNA, The Islamic Republic News Run Agency.

However, what sets these two agencies apart is the fact that Xinhua attempts to operate under the guise of a legitimate news agency.

As an American, and an admitted addict to internet news, the issue of censorship is alien and discomforting. When I was perusing an article on the New York Times a few months ago about the Xinhua Agency and Google (which I can no longer access), I was struck by the author's research. This author wrote about how the Chinese Government Censorship of Google Searches and Wikipedia posts removed all references to The 1989 Tiannamen Square Protests, an event which 100,000 protestors attended, and a thousands (reports are even as high as tens of thousands) were murdered by the military.

It is precisely these gross injustices regarding freedom of the press that are so repugnant to my western ideals of freedom and liberty. The Chinese Government's systematic denial of Free Press on the Internet by strangling the very essence of what companies like Google and GoDaddy provide to their clients, the freedom to wade through infinite amounts of content, from the incredulous, to the historical, the outlandish and the inane sites, blogs and portals. This is the nature of the internet, and in an era where the internet is the most powerful forum of ideas, the debates over content and censorship will only become more heated and will continue to engage people from peons to Prime Ministers.