“ The China-Google clash reveals an increasingly important global division that will become ever clearer from 2010 onward: between those who Google and those who do not. Citizens in those parts of the globe that adhere to a form of authoritarian capitalism will view information through the prism of Baidu or equivalent services willing to accept state monitoring and control. There is a possibility in this situation that the free Google of the rest of the world might evolve to become what American blue-jeans and rock-and-roll were to many young people in the communist bloc during the cold war: an icon of liberty. If, as Hillary Clinton implies, there is a 21st-century, virtual equivalent of the Berlin wall whose spiritual heart is Beijing - then the future, after all, may lie on the Google side.
January 24, 2010
