Google takes on China
January 12th, 2010 | by jz | Published in filtering, Future of the Internet | 33 Comments
Google announced today that it would cease (well, phase out) censoring the results in google.cn, the Chinese-language version of its famed search engine. It’s a pretty stunning move, both in its fact and in its execution. First, the announcement of “A new approach to China” may appear to have buried the lede. The lion’s share of the post is devoted to describing a series of coordinated attacks on the accounts of human rights activists, including those who use Google. It includes a link to the amazing story of GhostNet, discovered by fellow ONI researchers when the Dalai Lama gave them his oddly-acting laptop to examine.
Companies rarely share information about the cyberattacks they experience — conventional wisdom has it that it makes the company appear vulnerable, and drives customers away. Here Google is open about the attacks, while of course assuring readers that it had tightened security as a result. Google then links these attacks to a lessening of enthusiasm for doing business in China. Eliminating censorship in google.cn is only mentioned after that.
Suppose the Chinese government acts as expected and tells Google that it may no longer operate in China. Google.cn might vanish as a domain name, since it’s hosted under the Chinese country-code TLD of .cn, ultimately controllable by the Chinese government. But the search engine found there could of course keep operating from a different location, like cn.google.com. Suppose then that China attempts to filter out traffic to and from that new location — and to and from google.com for good measure, as it has done from time to time, especially before the advent of google.cn and its agreement to censor. (We’ll be watching for such moves at herdict.org, a site where users can report Web blockages.)
What next? My hope, and expectation, is that Google engineers who might have been a bit halfhearted about implementing censorship mandates in google.cn could be full-throttle in coming up with ways for Google to be viewed despite any network interruptions between site and user. There are lots of unexplored options here. They’re unexplored not because they’re infeasible, but because most sites would rather not provoke a government that filters. So they don’t undertake to get information out in ways that might evade blockages. Here, Google would have nothing more to lose, so could pioneer some new approaches. Circumvention of filtering (or other blockages, for that matter) tends to happen on the user side of things, seeking out proxies like the Tor network, or anonymizer.com.
To be sure, many of the larger benefits of operating in China originally cited by Google four years ago — exposing the citizenry to services beyond those locally grown and monitored; engaging them beyond the “China Wide Web” to which some government officials aspire to limit them; and gaining market share that can create momentum and support for later loosening of restrictions — may attenuate. Google.cn is less known and used than, say, the local Baidu search engine, which boasts about 60% market share. That share is about to get even bigger.
But drawing a line is both the right move and a brilliant one. It helps realign Google’s business with its ethos, and masterfully recasts the firm in a place it will feel more comfortable: supporting the free and open dissemination of information rather than metering it out according to undesirable (and capricious) government standards.
January 12th, 2010 at 8:14 pm (#)
Well, I’m not sure you really grasp the essential perspective on this one: what matters is public opinion in China, not in Stanford—and that opinion can be violently populist and nationalist even. For years, I couldn’t find any non-racist explanation on why Google’s market share was so low in China; now, I can’t find any information about what Chinese people thing about Google’s reaction… I mean: don’t call the Chinese government a dictatorship if you care less for the people’s opinion then they do.
January 12th, 2010 at 9:22 pm (#)
If China does go ahead and block google.com, what does it mean for:
1) Chinese businesses that use Google Apps (docs, email etc)
2) Non-China based businesses that operate in China and use Google Apps?
I guess they can route the traffic over VPN, and call it Business Contingency i.e. end-to-end business traffic. But what will China’s position be on such sort of re-routing?
January 13th, 2010 at 4:23 am (#)
[...] Jonathan Zittrain argues But [Google] drawing [the] line is both the right move and a brilliant one. It helps realign Google’s business with its ethos, and masterfully recasts the firm in a place it will feel more comfortable: supporting the free and open dissemination of information rather than metering it out according to undesirable (and capricious) government standards. [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 4:55 am (#)
[...] * Jonathan Zittrain [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 9:18 am (#)
“They’re unexplored not because they’re infeasible, but because most sites would rather not provoke a government that filters.”
But remember the difference between values and technology: If it works for citizens in China seeking human rights, it works for teenagers in America seeking porn.
January 13th, 2010 at 9:36 am (#)
[...] Google takes on China (tags: google censorship internet) [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 9:37 am (#)
[...] Google takes on China (tags: google censorship internet) [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 9:45 am (#)
[...] up to bat against China for the case of freedom of information. I think that Jonathan Zittrain has a great take on the situation: My hope, and expectation, is that Google engineers who might have been a bit halfhearted about [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 1:01 pm (#)
[...] Google takes on China futureoftheinternet.org: Google gjør det riktige når de dropper sensur i Kina, skriver Jonathan Zittrain. (tags: kina internett sensur google ytringsfrihet zittrain) [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 2:45 pm (#)
[...] online. Evgeny thinks Google is bluffing, or simply retreating from an unsuccesful market position. Jonathan Zittrain sees this as a masterstroke, aligning Google’s business with its values, and shares my hope that Google will dedicate [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 3:52 pm (#)
[...] Zittrain anticipates that if Google pulls down its China-based operations, it may be well positioned to develop [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 5:45 pm (#)
[...] in their analysis by exploring multiple scenarios that influenced Google’s decision. And on still others suggest the move will “realign Google’s business with its ethos”. This is one of those [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 7:06 pm (#)
I’m not convinced Google has “nothing more to lose” by promoting anti-circumvention. I forget the name of the Chinese dissident who was attacked at his home in the USA by unknown assailants – it’s an outlier, but it demonstrates the risk that Google would put its thousands of employees in if they declare war on the GFW. And as Peter Fleischer’s troubles in Italy demonstrate, this is a company that doesn’t want employees to be arrested on vacation at the real Great Wall.
But who knows, maybe they can support in more oblique ways?
January 14th, 2010 at 8:04 am (#)
[...] Jonathan Zittrain hofft auf mehr Unterstützung von Google bei der Umgehung von Zensur: Google takes on China. [...]
January 14th, 2010 at 2:45 pm (#)
[...] Jonathan Zittrain, Future of the Internet [...]
January 15th, 2010 at 4:33 pm (#)
One interesting item to think about is Google’s stock price after the announcement. When companies disclose a cyberattack against them, there is often an ensuing run on their publicly traded stock. Not the case here. Google’s rose through most of Wednesday and Thursday, but fell today. A delayed reaction to the China announcement? Perhaps.
January 15th, 2010 at 8:40 pm (#)
[...] a post on The Future of the Internet, Jonathan Zittrain says the lion’s share of the post is devoted to describing a series of [...]
January 16th, 2010 at 2:03 pm (#)
When I was in China, most of the people I knew used baidu.com (the search engine of choice) simply because it gave the best Chinese language search results. Google.cn is not as popular in China for the same reason Yahoo.com is not as popular in the US — it’s not the best search option.
(Also, baidu.com allows a Napster-like download of popular music, but only if your IP address is coming from China — an ironic twist to internet filtering.)
Whether Google decides to pursue the unfiltered search results option for China most likely won’t affect the average internet user in China because he or she simply won’t care.
In response to Saqib Ali, Google and its applications are extremely unstable in China. Individuals and businesses use them with the acknowledgment that they may experience arbitrary downtime.
January 16th, 2010 at 2:19 pm (#)
[...] Jonathan Zittrain: [...]
January 17th, 2010 at 5:44 pm (#)
[...] on still others suggest the move will “realign Google’s business with its ethos“. This is one of those moments where I am less concerned about motivations and more [...]
January 17th, 2010 at 10:45 pm (#)
Your “hope and expectation” seems surprisingly infantile, for someone of your purported pedigree.
Let’s imagine that Google.com does engage in Internet guerilla warfare, finding a way to make Google services available in China.
What then? How many multinational advertisers will want their brands and ads involved in this guerilla warfare? If Google escalates this conflict, how long until China returns fire by punishing other media creators (like Hollywood distributors) and/or advertisers that partner with Google? You play with fire, you take steps to *actively* violate Chinese law… you will get burned.
The best result Google can possibly hope for at this point, is that China allows it to take its ball and go home. It seems Google’s master plan for the next 10-20 years would be: survive as the big fish in the small pond that is the non-Chinese Internet.
January 17th, 2010 at 11:45 pm (#)
[...] Google.cn – with some of the clearest found in posts by Ethan Zuckerman, Evgeny Morozov, and Jonathan Zittrain, among others. The debate and points of interpretation mostly deal with Google’s potential [...]
January 18th, 2010 at 1:40 am (#)
The Obama Administration, following the Bush Administration (and Administrations all the way back to Nixon), is in the curious position of alliance with China. China is both enjoying what it cherry picks from the American Revolution as this revolution sweeps the globe, and at war with the other parts it picks from the same American Revolution. Obama and his administration are bewildered, but that is only because of their unswerving devotion to status quo radical corruption as politics rather than having any devotion to the American Revolution. Google is devoted to the American Revolution. History on on Google’s side, against China’s and against the US Government’s. Surely we live in the most interesting of times.
January 18th, 2010 at 6:02 am (#)
[...] “My hope, and expectation, is that Google engineers who might have been a bit halfhearted about implementing censorship mandates in Google.cn could be full-throttle in coming up with ways for Google to be viewed despite any network interruptions between site and user,” Mr. Zittrain wrote on his blog, The Future of the Internet and how to Stop It. [...]
January 18th, 2010 at 8:01 am (#)
“Whether Google decides to pursue the unfiltered search results option for China most likely won’t affect the average internet user in China because he or she simply won’t care.”
pls do not make The decision for Chinese people unless you REALLY know what they CARE!!
January 18th, 2010 at 10:43 am (#)
The ethics of Google self-serving gamble and the false expectations that it has generated are a confusing sign of where things are heading with the internet. The internet is evolving as realistically as possible. First, it was a “free-for-all” playing field where every participant did what he wanted. Then, came business which realized that the only commodity really produced using the web was the selling, trading, and buying of personal information disguised as a service and up to now that is their only business model on the internet. Now, we have governments trying to establish control of how society uses the information that is on the web as a mechanism of governing.
It would be naive to think that only France and China are the only governments trying to manipulate the medium as a mechanism of governing without thinking that our government here in the U.S. also uses the internet to keep tab on what it considers threats to the nation. China, though has taken it to a different level. They realize that in this day and age control of native web servers and filtering of external ones means control of how their people can think and view the world. They also realize the enourmous potential of the internet as weapon of both economic, and political war.
It is the beginning of a new internet age which will engender a battle between those seeking total openness and those seeking total control. There will be no in-between
compromises. That is why Google stands a good chance of being kicked out of China. American companies will continue to sell their souls to their Chinese business host as long as China throws them a bone from their markets. That is the real ethics of American business.
When it comes to personal involvement with the internet, the future will demand a more careful and knowledgeable participation. The mass of reckless participants will be manipulated in one form or another by both business and government. So, eventually it is going to be up to us as individuals to watch and care for our freedom of expression and interchange of ideas within this medium. There is no going back to the good old internet days, and there is no reason to expect that business and government will keep the medium a free for all medium.
January 18th, 2010 at 11:22 am (#)
Google employees have suffered in China, and if it weren’t China, that sort of treatment would bring down the wrath of Hillary. Markets tend to get the treatment their potential for growth allows. The big question, as I see it, is why is Google seemingly taking on China, and the U.S. seems to be out of focus? This is more about “informationization” which you can read about at: http://tek-tips.nethawk.net/blog/the-informationization-age
January 18th, 2010 at 3:06 pm (#)
Call on China to be firm to oppose Google hegemony – it has violated Chinese sovereignty with US government backing. The developing nations look to China to oppose US hegemony of all kinds.
January 18th, 2010 at 4:01 pm (#)
Google and China are bringing up a 21st century battle of democracy and freedom verse Communism and restricted personal freedom. When we started using cloud computing systems we saw the HUGE area of security problems being created in cross country internet usage. Thrown in that the entire world is “outsourcing” computer stuff to Southeast Asian countries, and you have a plan for these socio-technology issues going to ahead. We study search demand/supply trends from around the world to find profitable niches and products. A niche, or hot predictions, is not just a demand side issue, but a supply/demand curve. If you predict IPHONE apps will take off, and there are already 100,000 aps, then you aren’t going to hit that one. If you see that demand for cell phone radiation shields is going nuts and there are only two suppliers, then you can be pretty sure that it will be a good year for those 2 supplies. The software at http://www.TheInternetTimeMachine.com studies both the demand (search volume) and supply (think “results” in Google). The Google Phone is generating much more buzz right now then say the Apple Tablet.
Cheers,
Curt
Here is a video on what I mean.. http://bit.ly/SupplyDemandCurves
January 20th, 2010 at 8:35 am (#)
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January 20th, 2010 at 8:47 am (#)
[...] Jonathan Zittrain [...]
January 21st, 2010 at 8:25 am (#)
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January 23rd, 2010 at 1:29 pm (#)
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