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 Media freedom organisation the Doha Centre has called on Google to reject alleged censorship demands by the Dubai Police – and ballsed it all up in the process.
A release by the Doha Centre
claimed Dubai Police “chief inspector” Dhahi Khalfan Tamim met “Giselle Hescuk”, the search giant’s head of development in EMEA, last month, to discuss a “censorship plan” which would see the usual suspects – pornography, religion, atheism, etc – blocked in the UAE.
Ah, if only it were that simple.
Sadly, the Doha Centre has managed to get almost every single fact in its statement wrong, either through distortion or just outright wrongness.
Let’s start at the top: “chief inspector” Dhahi Khalfan Tamim is of course actually lieutenant general Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, general commander of Dubai Police. As anyone who’s ever read Inspector Morse knows, the chief inspector is the bloke in a bad anorak who goes around solving things.
Then the mysterious “Giselle Hescuk”. A quick Google search reveals that the only place she is ever mentioned is the Doha Centre’s own report – which seems improbable, considering she’s supposed to work for the search engine.
On the basis that this all must have come from somewhere, we searched the Dubai Police site (don’t try this at home, kids...) for anything mentioning Google, and found this cut-and-paste job from Gulf News
– describing a meeting between “Gisel Hiscock” and the great and the good of Dubai Police.
Then the meeting. The Doha Centre describes it thus: “...met in March to draw up a censorship plan which the UAE authorities said would ‘maintain religious harmony and prevent any infringements of religious and ethnic integrity in the light of local culture and traditions’.”
The Doha Centre's version of events seems to be based on this story, originally from AlArabiya.net
In the original Gulf News article, as quoted on the DP site, Google’s Hiscock reportedly said the “visit was part of a tour she is undergoing in the region to listen to ideas and recommendations as well as to prepare for future meetings with officials to address specific concerns” – which would seem to be confirmed by, among other things, this interview.
At the heart of all this is a list of 500 words which the UAE authorities want banned from search results – as yet, this list is not publicly available. The Doha Centre sees this as ominous – but the truth may be that the list just isn’t ready yet.
To its credit, the Khaleej Times refused to quite take this release on face value, and actually rang up Dubai Police to ask what was going on; this is the relevant paragraph from the KT story: “Dr Mohammad Mourad, the director of decision making at Dubai Police, said the list, originally compiled by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, has not been finalised. Dubai Police will meet with representatives from YouTube, owned by Google, in two weeks to discuss the potential YouTube ban.”
So the meeting to “draw up” a censorship plan was more of a meet-and-greet – and the official censorship request isn’t even quite ready yet. And quite why Dubai Police would be handling this, when it would normally be down to the TRA, escapes us.
Now – what’s not in dispute is that the UAE authorities DO want to crack down on certain search terms, and especially YouTube videos filled with teh nasties and teh pr0nz, and WILL be trying to get Google to do just this.
We would argue that this is a bad thing, and, ultimately, futile – and we would certainly support the arguing of the case for internet freedom.
But when a “media freedom” organisation comes out with something that’s badly-researched and downright misleading, we would suggest this actually undermines the other efforts that may be going on.
For example, we can’t imagine Ms Hiscock is hugely impressed with the rendering of her name, or the nature of the meeting – strike one for the free-internet argument.
This is a pressing issue – Google has famously welched on its free-for-all philosophy in the case of China, in recognition of the realpolitiks of the situation, and the fact that it’s a damn huge market.
Will the same happen here? The UAE is a far, far smaller market, and is much, much less restrictive than China when it comes to web access, so we would think there’s likely to be no easy way to make Google just roll over and comply.
Come on, Doha Centre – you should be setting an example for journalistic standards, not banging out any old crud. You can do better than this...
UPDATE 14/04/09: Google has issued a statement:
"At Google we believe in engaging with users, businesses, non-profits, and governments in order to address whatever questions or concerns they may have about our products. It's the best way for us to understand the local countries in which we operate, and for others to understand Google, YouTube, and the policies around our products.
"As part of this effort, Google met with the Dubai Police along with several other entities spanning government, business and public sector across the region. Contrary to false reports no censorship plan was drawn up."
Fairly definitive. Despite Google being the now-archetypal Big American Corporation, we are actually inclined to believe them on this one.
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