Conspiracies surrounding the world’s most highly used search engine are nothing new. Tech nerds have long speculated on the myriad ways in which Google could be selling off our personal information piecemeal to the highest bidder, or even volunteering information to our own government in an effort to create some kind of dystopian regime roughly resembling the love child of William Gibson and George Orwell.
Recently, though, the tables have turned as Google has pointed US authorities towards the Chinese government in a nasty blame game over the hacking of human rights activists’ email accounts. Google’s threats to back their business out of the world’s largest country (read: largest untapped market share) have caused many users to fear for the worst, with new speculations running amok all across the internet.
While the collective internet these days is about as emotionally stable as a slumber party full of thirteen year old girls, word of the Google China hacking has made both front page news and a national speech from Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, thereby becoming an issue of American policy and international relations. Not one to succumb to what they consider bullying, China has responded with resounding criticism, mainly through articles in the government’s own China Daily news, claiming that SOS Clinton’s speech makes them “fear for the common future of our human race”, and calling Google a mouthpiece for the American government’s vendetta against Chinese censorship policy. If Google was okay with the arguable truthiness of China’s original stipulations for Google.cn, what exactly did it take to incite such a sense of political duty in a the world’s most powerful search engine?
