

Google 2010: What Makes the Muskrat Guard His Musk - rfreytag
http://www.cringely.com/2010/01/google-2010-what-makes-the-muskrat-guard-his-musk/

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fh
Google says that they will do the right thing (in their opinion) and stop
collaborating with the Chinese regime, and your first comment to that is about
the lost opportunity for profit. I'm shocked.

Now, I agree that Google probably does this for rather selfish reasons,
abandoning a market that's not profitable to them anyway in a PR effective
way. However, I wonder: Is there no room in American capitalism for
consideration of the morality of helping evil governments oppress their
people? Is this not a discussion we should have had years ago?

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rfreytag
Now everyone in China, the fastest growing market, knows that if they can get
to Google (and they can) then their results will be honest.

Shrewed public move into a niche no established China search engine can fill.

Ethics pays.

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po
The satellite angle he proposes at the end of the article is interesting but
the dishes are one-way. Rooftop dishes don't broadcast up to the satellite. A
request is made through a phone line and the content is then sent down to all
dishes. Your dish then decodes the part that was meant for you. It works
because the bandwidth of satellite broadcast is so fat, it can support the
average of all of the customers at once.

China would not allow the uplink. Unless there is some new technology I'm not
aware of, it won't work.

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arghnoname
I'm pretty sure that what you are saying is true with regard to satellite
Internet, and I had the same thought you did in reading that point. I do
wonder though, how do sat-phones work?

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po
Those actually do broadcast back up to the satellite with a radio. I think the
bandwidth is extremely limited though.

Prices would probably be around $5 per megabyte. Nothing the average chinese
would be able to afford, and there's no way Google would be able to recoup
that:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#Porta...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#Portable_satellite_modem)

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arghnoname
Ah thanks, that's interesting. Before I saw a sat phone, I thought power draw
would be too much of an issue, but obviously it works.

I suppose you could beam in static versions of wikipedia, chinese language
information, etc, easily enough via satellite or terrestrial sources, like
radio free Europe. As a publicly traded corporation, if Google started putting
money into a venture without any hope for revenue to antagonize a major world
power, the shareholders would likely object.

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po
Oh, here's an idea: I was at a tech party here in Tokyo recently saw a device
that was simply a wikipedia gadget. Just an LCD screen and a keyboard for
searching. They said that as a user you were entitled to two updates a year.

As a someone who already has an iPhone with access to wikipedia I didn't see
the point of it, but if you put the Chinese version of wikipedia and a
satellite receiver into it…

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sethg
_Google is going to have zero impact on China — zero — by abandoning that
market_

What influence over China do they have now?

