Connected Conversations

It is exhilarating news that Google is going to step up to bat against China for the case of freedom of information. I think that Jonathan Zittrain has a great take on the situation:

My hope, and expectation, is that Google engineers who might have been a bit halfhearted about implementing censorship mandates in google.cn could be full-throttle in coming up with ways for Google to be viewed despite any network interruptions between site and user. There are lots of unexplored options here. They’re unexplored not because they’re infeasible, but because most sites would rather not provoke a government that filters. So they don’t undertake to get information out in ways that might evade blockages. Here, Google would have nothing more to lose, so could pioneer some new approaches. Circumvention of filtering (or other blockages, for that matter) tends to happen on the user side of things, seeking out proxies like the Tor network, or anonymizer.com.

I love how Zittrain examines the situation from a strategic perspective, with moves and responses. I also find it provocative to consider what a massive organization like Google could do to help Chinese citizens workaround government filters.

But I think that Zittrain does not follow his chess game to its ultimate conclusion. If Google can help a large minority of Chinese citizens to get unfettered access to information, the Chinese government will press the US to enforce its policies. Presumably, Google can win the spy-vs-spy tech game with China. But China has a lot of political chips to cash in to try to win the support of the US government to rein in Google.

Already, the State Department is recognizing that this issue is extremely important (although they have not yet announced a policy or substantive statement). But when push comes to shove, will it support Google in its battle vs. China?

I certainly hope it does. Go google!

1. technology, 2. politics Censorship, China, google, Jonathan Zittrain, policy

McKinsey has published this terrific interview of Hal Varian, the Chief Economist of Google. (Why does Google need a Chief Economist and what does he do?!) The whole thing is worth reading, but I’ll highlight two quotes that I esepcially enjoyed.

First, he has a nice way of highlighting how digital distribution has reshaped the economics of intellectual property:

Back in the early days of the Web, every document had at the bottom, “Copyright 1997. Do not redistribute.” Now every document has at the bottom, “Copyright 2008. Click here to send to your friends.”

No longer is the Internet about ‘browsing alone’–the value comes the social activity of sharing.

Second, he validates my decision to go back and get a PhD (or at least the portion of the time that I spent studying statistics):

I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it.

Unlike computer programmers (who are valuable for creating programs), statisticians are valuable not for creating new statistics algorithms but in the ability to apply statistical analyses to business problems.

I hope that Hal is right!

Via Aleks Jakulin

1. technology, 3. et cetera google, phd, statistics