Building cultural walls in Cyberspace

An article from Bloomberg News discussed how Google adjusted their web services with national cultures. In Thailand, they banned YouTue to show videos which offended King Bhumibol Adulyadej. In China, Google stopped offering Gmail to Chinese Citizen to avoid government demands for messages. To be able to stop user from using a specific web services, Google must rely on the programming codes. Now these codes with geo-sensitive information are used to build walls within Cyberspace, either due to political reason or to respect the natioanl cultures. The multinational enterprise is now taking the duty to fund the building of these walls using their codes. Cultural walls is not an entirely bad concept since a neigbhood enjoy more harmony when there are walls between them.

Contrast this to Lawrence Lessig's "Code wants to be free" concept, we could see that multinational enterprises were using codes to control information flow. The force to from multinational enterprises is gaining strengthen because these companies expand their influence by acquiring companies (like Google acquired YouTube and the planning integration of Yahoo & Microsft)

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