I'm in India, a country that has just joined the North Korea-Myanmar-Saudi Arabia-China-Zimbabwe net censorship club:

So, India has finally made it to a select club of nations. So far, we were only part of a wider group where the state could bar internet access. Now we’ve taken entry to the North Korea-Myanmar-Saudi Arabia-China-Zimbabwe club where even blog access is state-determined. There are two things to note here, and the first would have already struck even those who aren’t sure what a blog is: most newspapers have already carried, alongside the censorship reports, detailed pieces on how to use the internet to access the forbidden sites anyway. This isn’t due to a dissident mindset: newspapers solidly part of the establishment have done so. They had to, simply to remain relevant: an elementary query on Google will take you to website after website which tells you exactly how to evade such decrees and the information was on blog after blog within hours of last week’s order.

The pundits who embrace or reject globalisation too often live in an eternal present and ignore the lessons of the phenomenon’s deep past, says Alex MacGillivray in openDemocracy.

The amnesiac approach is particularly marked in relation to globalisation, where breathless noting of the latest awesome statistic can replace a search for the historical context and meaning that can alone make sense of it.

If this is true of news journalism, it is less so of the background analysis of experts like Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat) and John Ralston Saul (The Collapse of Globalism). The publication of these two books at the moment I was finalising my own book on the subject (A Brief History of Globalization) may be healthy evidence that the balance of understanding is shifting.

India, China and Google seemed to dominate the discussion yesterday at Microsoft's breakfast discussion in Davos. Bill Gates and Tom Friedman debated their flat-world theory, the Chindia effect, hi-tech education and development agendas. Comparing India and China, Gates argued that the challenge for India was to take the latest technology being developed to the villages in the country. Bangalore also came in for comment, as Friedman recalled his experiences there. He said that Bangalore had its islands of high technology, but a few hours out of the city took you back several centuries. Friedman spoke about the education crisis in the US. Elaborating on what the Bill Gates Foundation was doing in this sphere in the US and referring to the quality of higher education improving in China, he said we could expect Beijing or Shanghai to be part of the top 25 education destinations in the future. He also referred to India's IITs.

Gates surprised tech industry participants when he said the majority of Microsoft’s research and development will remain in the United States 10 years from now. When asked about Google's business practices in China, the richest man in the world said that he thought the internet "is contributing to Chinese political engagement" as "access to the outside world is preventing more censorship".

DNA/India:

Microsoft started the year with a PR disaster, of having to admit that they did indeed take the blog down on the request of Chinese authorities. The company abides by local laws in all countries it operates in, a statement said.

After the incident hit headlines, a lot of focus is now on the role of American technology in abetting the internet censorship and on information control by the Chinese government.

Apart from ensuring that sensitive information does not show up in search results, which is done with the help of software filters, the government reportedly employs over 30,000 human filters or internet police who track all that is being said or written in chat rooms, blogs and message boards and delete ‘inappropriate content’. Bruno Gussiani’s Lunch over IP understands that “it may be hard for a single company to take a stand alone, when others operating in the same industry don’t and are willing to bend over to please the political demands”. But nevertheless, “Microsoft is a special company, a highly symbolic one”, he says.

China, with over 100 million web users, is the world’s second largest Internet market. Companies like MSN, Google and Yahoo are caught between a commitment towards human rights and freedom of speech and the lucrative Chinese internet market, the precondition of which is compliance with censorship.

Guardian: By 2050, China and India will make up half of the global economy

Randeep Ramesh in Gangtok, Sikkim
Friday September 30, 2005

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