Boycott Google
As usual, L. Neil Smith is right.
…Google is taking the one and only thing today that could make the Chinese people free—indeed, the only thing these days that keeps America and the rest of the western world free—and gutting it to specifications provided by a demented conspiracy of mass-murdering butchers.
…
Google is helping the Chinese government keep the Chinese people oppressed.
I’ve removed Google advertising from this blog and have decided to get behind Dan Verton’s call to boycott Google now.
As Yahoo and MSN do the same things, I’ll be looking at several lesser used search engines to find one to recommend to everybody I know. For right now, I’m using Clusty and it’s very good. Once I get the hang of it, I think it may even be more convenient than Google anyway. Clusty organizes the search results it shows you, letting you browse “clusters” of search results grouped together according to how they appear to be related.
But back to L. Neil Smith’s piece. I can’t resist sharing this gem of perceptive wisdom from it:
Oh, yeah. What about the argument that Google is private property? Well no, it isn’t. It’s a corporation, which means that it’s simply a bunch of guys who sought to achieve certain powers and immunities by applying for them to the State. As such, Google is a creature of the State—Google is the State itself—and it deserves zero special consideration.
Shameless commercial message: you should buy his books.
Update: Eugene Plawiuk has a reply to this post.
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I disagree with L. Neil that a corporation per se is a creature of the state. Robert Hessen in his book In Defense of the Corporation shows that the characteristic features of corporations are consistent with contractual relationships in the market. (Limited liability in contracts is no problem; limited liability in torts is a red herring.) Indeed, if we wish to defend unorthodox forms of ownership by workers, we might not want to reject the corporate form. That said, what difference does this make to the criticism of Google for cooperating with the Chinese government? Google’s conduct is objectionable and suitable for boycott because it is a private firm allying itself with a state in a nefarious mission. Why muddy the issue?
I agree with you somewhat that the point is either unrelated or, alternatively, that he ought to have put together a better segue into that point. Although I’ve heard of but not read Hessens book, I’ll say right off the bat that I’m square with contractually limited liability but very skeptical of the assertion that limiting torts is a “red herring”. I suppose I’ll have to read the book, though.
Two things on limited liability: Big corporations typically have huge amounts of liability insurance and/or net assets; second, why should a shareholder who plays no active role in a company be liable beyond his investment? The principle of vicarious liability is sound as long as it applies only to those “who participate actively in management and control” (Hessen). But he condemns the “one-man corporation” that is designed to shield the active owner from liability. Hessen, by the way, rejects the “entity” theory of the corporation. Rather than seeing a corporation as an entity, Hessen writes that we should see it as the outcome of a network of contracts.
Re: limited liability…
Well, I believe ownership of an asset ought to imply, if we set aside potential contractual restraints on behavior, absolute right to that assets use and absolute liability for its misuse (misuse being defined as use in violating the rights of another).
But what is insured is itself — the legal fictitious entity known as “the company”. The company itself is not a volitional being. Where the role of management allows a company to mimic volition, it does so without personal responsibility being borne by the actual conscious actors — the management.
As I believe the management are supposed to be merely agents for the owners anyway, it follows that owners ought to be responsible for their property — just like any other property you’re free to use.
You miss the point. NOT playing an active role in the management of your joint property can lead to that property being used in ways that violate the rights of others. That’s negligence in my book.
Shareholders will put management on a short enough leash when it becomes clear that they can’t get away with ducking responsibility for negligence if their property merely happens to be one particular type of property (stock).
The argument for limited liability, as I understand it, is not just that investors don’t in fact exercise direct control over the corporation, but rather that they contractually have no right to do so. (But that seems like a good reason to deny that they’re full owners of the corporation too.)
In any case, although I think there’s a good case for saying the investors aren’t liable, someone — some live person — needs to be liable for what the corporation does. If not the shareholders, then why not the managers — the ones who actually make the decisions? So I’m not sure why the Hessen argument against shareholder liability isn’t an argument for manager liability, rather than an argument for limited liability.
Very good point.
Touche. I’m reading Piet-Hein van Eeghen’s two-part article on the illegitimacy of the corporation as legal entity in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Summer and Fall 2005. Part 2 is a critique of Hessen–and it is very persuasive. I’m taking a fresh look at the whole matter.
P.S.: Both articles are online at http://www.mises.org.
[...] My friend Jim argues that censorship on the internet is doomed. Of course, he’s right. But IMHO that’s not the real point, and it glosses over the potential for harm with which Google is playing. And my opinion is in line with that of L. Neil Smith (via Brad Spangler). What’s going on is that a private company is assisting a government in oppressing its people. It’s that simple. They’re doing it pretty much in a direct manner, as a matter of fact, and they admit this. While that may be doomed to failure, that doesn’t mean that people won’t be harmed in the process. Slavery was doomed to failure from the start, but while it was going on it did a lot of stuff to impact actual people’s lives. [...]
[...] I’m still officially boycotting Google over their assistance with Chinese censorship. However, I’m under no illusions that anyone else will join me in that effort. I’m just avoiding using Google because I find their collaboration with the Chinese regime repugnant on a personal level. [...]
Google also supports censorship in America….
Try Placing (paying) for a negative ad on their site ….. the ad will be canceled and your site will disapear from Google searches…
Words like Boycott, Protest and others are not acceptable in ad campaigns.
Corporations control the internet now… Google chooses what you see and what you won’t…….