<nettime> Google in China, RIM in Saudi Arabia

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

What happened to the great showdown between freedom-loving            
tech-companies -- who were supposed to depend on earning their        
users's trust by protecting their privacy -- and authoritarian        
governments bent on all-around surveillance and censorship?           

While initially there has been a lot of press about Google challenging
the Chinese government, the reports have slowed to a trickle recently.
>From what I understand, China has renewed Google commercial license
for another year or two, though it remains unclear under which
conditions. This seems to indicate that the government got enough
of what it wanted, or, that it doesn't see Internet-freedom as so
threatening, after all. [1]

And then there is RIM decision to cooperate fully with Saudi Arabia's
authorities to prevent their email services to be banned in the
country. Instead of protecting their users's privacy, RIM (the company
that makes the Blackberry devices) agreed to "to locate three servers
within Saudi Arabia, putting them under the jurisdiction of local
security forces and thus removing the necessity of the planned ban."
[2]




[1] http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/07/google-china-fiction/
[2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/09/rim_saudi_arabia/












--- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------- books out now:
*|Deep Search.The Politics of Search Beyond Google.Studienverlag 2009
*|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008
*|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 
*|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 








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