American internet companies want a piece of China pie

China has a personality disorder. Its a communist country that is surging ahead with private business, and at the same time trying to stifle free speech.

The internet scares the pants off them, with its border defying capability. Recently search engine Google agreed to self-censorship to appease the Chinese government. Some US Congressmen have condemned Google, along with Microsoft for doing this.

The Chinese market is huge and these American companies want access to all those new customers. Sometimes companies will do anything to get to China’s customers. Boeing, once the world’s leading aircraft manufacturer, signed an agreement with China, agreeing to let the Chinese build parts of certain aircraft and build the largest spare parts facility in the world. Boeing basically had to give away part of the farm to China, teaching them how to build aircraft, knowing full well, that in this century there will probably be a Chinese passenger aircraft to rival Boeing.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Cisco were invited to a meeting in Washington to explain their actions, but all declined. Tom Lantos, top Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, said: “There has been a string of disturbing incidents in which US-based Internet companies have bowed to pressure from Beijing.” “These massively successful high-tech companies, which couldn’t bring themselves to send representatives to this meeting today, should be ashamed. They caved in to Beijing for the sake of profits.”

That sounds great, but the US government itself will censor anyone at anytime, if it feels what they have to say is ‘not in the country’s interest’. The fact that the Chinese and US governments are concerned with companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco indicates how powerful the internet is and how much of it these companies control.

How does this all affect Indonesia? Well we get anything online we want, even though Indonesia has a habit of ‘shooting the messenger’. The internet is an empowering tool, allowing villagers access to information and to have a global voice. Indonesia should develop its infrastructure to support affordable broad band internet access.