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 "Photo: Photo courtesy Students For a Free Tibet")
 "Photo: Photo courtesy Students For a Free Tibet")
Protests are not uncommon on the Auraria Campus, but the target of the most recent protest - the Internet search engine giant Google - is not a company often protested.
The company found itself in the crosshairs of a campaign coordinated by Students For a Free Tibet on
Feb. 14. The protest - which took the form of an informational table near the flagpole - came in response to the launch of Google.cn, the Chinese version of Google's wildly popular search engine launched Jan. 25 that allows Chinese authorities to censor and block access to information on Tibet, human rights and other topics sensitive to Chinese authority. The group encouraged people to call Google offices and "break up" with the company. In all, the event netted about 60 to 70 calls over a three-hour period to Google headquarters protesting the censorship, according to the coordinator of the event.
"Google has made a decision to sleep with the enemy," said Tenzing Shrestha, a coordinator with Students for a Free Tibet and a former University of Colorado at Denver student. "I can't be a party to helping the Chinese government repress more than a billion people in Tibet and China."
Google representatives in the Denver area and in the company's California headquarters did not return several calls as of press time. Representatives from the Chinese Embassy in Washington also did not return several messages left seeking response to the protest as of press time.
However, in a Jan. 27 statement posted on a Google blog by Google Senior Policy Counsel Andrew McLaughlin, the company explained its rationale for agreeing to censor some information on the request of the Chinese government.
The statement said Google.com is down about 10 percent of the time in China, and that Google News doesn't work at all, and when some people do access search results, it stalls out the user's browser. "At Google we work hard to create a great experience for our users, and the level of service we've been able to provide in China is not something we're proud of," McLaughlin wrote.
Google.cn was launched to alleviate those issues, but, "In order to do so, we have agreed to remove certain sensitive information from our search results," according to the statement. McLaughlin said Google knows that many people are upset by this decision, "and frankly, we understand their point of view."
The statement said the company thought long and hard about entering the Chinese market, and that ultimately, the decision was made by considering which course of action would allow Google to realize its mission to organize the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible. "Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world's population, however, does so far more severely," the statement said.
"We have the responsibility here, above mere commercial interests, to look at and to be open to criticizing what is taking place," said Sean Scanlan, an adjunct philosophy professor at Metro State who stopped by the table Feb. 14. "We would never accept this level of political censorship for commercial interests," Scanlan said. "Should we be willing to tolerate this kind of (action) abroad to make money here at home?"
The protest was hosted on campus by the student group Action at Auraria. The group's president, UCDHSC student Elizabeth Tang, said most people are surprised when they learn that Google has allowed the Chinese government to censor search results. She emphasized that Google is a good search engine and added, "It's just that we believe the Internet is one of the only things that is a global tool, where censorship doesn't exist, especially when it comes to politics."
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