by Andrew Sengul
“Google’s been cheating on you with the Chinese government,” shouted Kerala Hise, a member of Students for a Free Tibet (SFT) at the University of Puget Sound. “Break up with Google for Valentine’s Day!”
Hise and eight other demonstrators gathered outside Google, Inc.’s Seattle sales office near the south end of Lake Union yesterday to protest the company’s censorship of search results served to Chinese Internet users.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, Inc. announced that it would create a Chinese Web address on Jan. 25th. With this announcement came an admission from Google that in order to obtain a Chinese Internet domain license, they agreed to not generate search results for Chinese users showing Web pages with content that the Chinese government finds objectionable.
“When I heard what Google had done I switched from GMail back to WebPine,” said UW senior Tsering Lhadon, president of the UW chapter of Students for a Free Tibet. “I visited Tibet last year and the censorship is very strict. You can’t search for anything to do with the Dalai Lama in Tibet, but it used to be more relaxed if you went to Beijing.”
Representatives from the Tibetan Association of Washington (TAW) and the Taiwanese-American Foundation of Greater Seattle joined Lhadon and the SFT members. They held signs, chanted slogans and handed leaflets to people who passed them on the sidewalk.
The demonstration on Dexter Avenue was part of an international Valentine’s Day campaign against the new Google policy organized by Students for a Free Tibet. Concurrent protests were held at Google offices in Bangalore, Zurich, New York and 10 other cities around the world.
“Google and many other corporations enjoy the democracy and freedom of speech in this country and make billions of dollars here,” said former TAW president Jamgang Dorjee, “and then they go into different countries and help suppress those same freedoms. We want to make sure people in Seattle know what Google is doing.”
The response from passers-by was generally positive, and not many refused the leaflets handed out by protesters.
“I think it’s great what they’re doing,” said Elizabeth Christopher, who works in a neighboring office building.
Google employees declined to comment and were unwilling to speak with demonstrators.
