The world's largest Internet search company and the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity.

Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google -- and its users -- from future attack.

Here is my response to James:

James,

In December 2009 Google did nothing to stand up for human rights and against censorship besides mouth the same pretty words it always has.

In January 2010 Google threatened to break Chinese law, putting at risk a market of 100 million Google users, the safety of all Google employees in China, and all Google property in China.

What changed? Too much guilt? The Grinch heard the Hoos singing and his heart grew?

A serious business problem grew from something Google thought it could ignore to something it thought it could not ignore.

I want people to move away from the focus on free speech and human rights because those are OUR concerns. This is a complex and potentially Web-shattering move on Google's part. It was not taken lightly. To get a realistic picture of what is at stake we must get beyond the concerns of US liberals such as ourselves.

This is China, after all. And nothing Google does in terms of censorship of Web search is going to make one bit of difference to anyone suffering under Chinese oppression. Finding pictures of tanks just does not matter that much.

Google would not, should not, could not risk all that because it felt a bit icky about doing business with China. If it had, Google would have done this long ago.

Every corporation in the world mouths pretty words about being responsible and moral. Even tobacco companies do. Henry Ford was convinced he led a company from the moral high ground. There is no substance to claims of corporate responsibility short of marketing strategy.

Who is being unrealistic here?

---

and more a bit later:

Well, "all accounts" means taking Google blog posts at their words. I think we should have learned by now that Google's claims of benevolence merely serve its marketing goals. Whether they mean it or not does not matter. I don't see why we should buy it from Google when we don't buy it from Chevron.

What's in their hearts does not matter.

Motivations don't free dissidents. Neither do search results.

Google clearly does not want people to focus on the insecurity of their systems. That's why no company made noise about his until now. To distract from the vulnerabilities, Google made sure to make that empty pledge to offer uncensored search on Google.cn. Do you really think that is going to happen?

So getting back to my larger point: paying attention to the moral implications only makes Google execs feel better, makes us feel better, and fools us into thinking that such issues are of central importance to anyone with anything at stake.

The problem is that free speech is simple and understandable here in the US.

Internet security is complicated and boring to most people.

If we continue to focus on the so far empty gesture of wishing for uncensored search results -- and thus a clear violation of Chinese law -- then we miss the bigger story.

The bigger story will matter much more in the long and short terms. Can we trust the security of any online service? Are they all vulnerable to state hackers? How about non-state actors?

THAT is a big deal. If we don't focus on that we will be in much bigger trouble.

That's why I applaud Google for taking a stand for the Internet. The future of the Internet is at stake. Obviously, what is good for the Internet is good for Google.

Here is my response:

The Internet has enough diverse interests and players that it demands governance. No traditional state is in the position or willing to assume that role. So Google governs the Internet.

One could read this showdown (as I do) as a classic international power conflict between a major traditional state and a new, virtual state: the Googlenet.

Google is taking a risky stand to defend the Internet generally. This is what a weaker, threatened state would do.

Of all the issues that have tangled and troubled Google, none has the gravity and complexity as the company's relationship with the People's Republic of China. As I write this on the 20th anniversary of the massacre of hundreds of young pro-democracy demonstrators near Tiananmen Square, I am acutely reminded of the recent history of brutality in the world's largest nation state. Also on this day, as I write about Google's relationship with China, the Chinese government has deployed all its technologies of Internet censorship to block people in China from using social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook. And it has blocked access to many Google services such as Blogger and YouTube in the days leading up to the 20th anniversary of the events of June 1989. Yet, as a global citizen plugged in to the rapid flows of people, ideas, data, and money, I am optimistically aware of the potential of China to generate many important ideas, technologies, and scientific breakthroughs in the remainder of this century. Mostly, I would be foolish to minimize the importance of 1.3 billion people as a market for labor, products, and services.

As I reflect on the duties, obligations, and culpability of Google in such an environment, I can only conclude that critics of the company's approach to China hold it to an unreasonable standard. At the same time, those who assert that Google's presence in China improves transparency or offers aid to those who struggle for basic human rights there are just as misguided.

Now, this is not an easy conclusion. Both cases -- that Google is making a bad situation worse in China and that Google is part of the steady liberalization of China -- have persuasive arguments behind them. From the point of view of many human-rights and free-speech advocates, Google is doing business with criminals and is thus morally culpable as part of the structures of oppression. From the point of view of market or techno-fundamentalists, Google is reforming a corrupt system by allowing a little bit of light into an otherwise dark environment - a little Google is better in the long run than none at all.

The odd thing about Google in authoritarian parts of the world - as opposed to just about everywhere else - is how little it matters. Google plays no role in actively oppressing the Chinese people. And Google plays almost no role in their potential liberation as well. These two positions - that Google is part of the problem and that Google is part of the solution in China - emerge from a lack of understanding of both the Internet in general and Google's policies and services in China. If The People's Republic of China ever opens itself up to the turmoil of free speech and democratic accountability, it will not be merely because the Internet was free and open or because Google did not help the government limit access to certain sites. Nothing is that simple.

The Myth of the "Great Firewall"

China is hardly sealed off from the rest of the world. It never really has been, even during the brutal Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Openness is a sliding scale without absolutes. The outside world was shocked to discover, after the fact, that millions of Chinese had starved during the economic "reforms" of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and that Chinese society had been fractured right down to the level of the family during the Cultural Revolution. But there were hints and indications that life in China during these periods was intolerable for many. Only the scale was hidden.

In recent decades China has plugged itself into to the world's social, economic, and technological flows. China has more Internet users than any other country, despite the fact that only 16 percent of the population was online regularly as of 2009. Now the standard lines of thought about China vacillate between a rising and dynamic economic giant and a brutal totalitarian society that forces its citizens to curb their associations and imaginations. Neither of these models is accurate. China has a thriving market economy that is still significantly guided from the central state in matters of macroeconomics and large-scale investment. It has a state apparatus that is just as corrupt and incompetent as vicious - although it displays its brutal effectiveness without hesitation when it needs to, as events in Tibet in 2008 demonstrate. China is still authoritarian, tolerating little overt dissent over policies it considers off limits such as treatment of dissident religious groups, pornography, its efforts to destroy Tibetan culture, or the events of June 4, 1989.

The style of state censorship in China is complex as well. There is no "Great Firewall," as many of those reporting on China have asserted. China's Internet filtering and blocking policy is not sturdy and impenetrable, like a wall. It's more fluid and situational. It's more like the dystopian model described in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than that of George Orwell's 1984 - distraction and consumerism crowd out meaningful dissent and troublesome expression. China has ways of blocking most of the sites and messages to which it objects, however imperfectly. But for the most part, most of the time, for the most people in China, site censorship impacts daily life in China very little.

China cranks up the tools of censorship during times of potential social unrest, such as the 2008 Olympics, the 20th anniversary of the June 4 massacre, and protests in Tibet. When it does block access to a site or a service, Chinese censors mask the nature of the disruption by indicating that a connection has failed or has been reset, rather than blocked or forbidden. This subtle tactic serves to frustrate the general user in China without generating clear and targeted resentment against the state. Forbidden material is thus not completely unavailable to Chinese Internet users. It's just a challenge to get it and searching for it puts a user at risk if his usage is being monitored and perhaps abused by state power if such behavior reaches an unclear threshold. Still, those adept at technology may find their way through the cracks in the system by using strong encryption or proxy servers to hide or spoof the government's censoring and surveillance technologies. The Chinese Internet censorship project does not pretend to seal China off from certain sources or ideas. It just hopes to marginalize and track those who are already motivated to seek troublesome sites and association while satisfying the desires and curiosities of the vast majority of Chinese Internet users. The Chinese government has a strong interest in deterring and generating fear among those who would use the Internet to coordinate trouble or dissent. But it has just as strong an interest in ensuring that commerce flowers in China. Global commerce depends on a reliable and malleable communication infrastructure such as the Internet. Commerce also requires tools such as strong encryption and "Virtual Private Networks" to protect sensitive data or trade secrets. So China won't outlaw its use or enforce restrictions on methods of hiding information.

As a result, China has built a fascinating and flexible system that simultaneously allows private firms to exploit the Internet with almost as much freedom as American and European companies have, distract the greater population with the prospects of consumption and entertainment, yet encumber political and religious dissidents enough to limit their influence on daily life. That's not to say that China's Internet is "open" or "free" - far from it. Elites, as always, get to buy more freedom than the rest of Chinese society. As journalist James Fallows has explained, the most effective aspect of Chinese Internet policy is its unpredictability. China has harnessed the power of inconvenience as its most effective weapon in stifling political dissent - and even awareness.

Yahoo's Big Sin

The fact that China's Internet is penetrable by the technologically adept does not mean that doing so is risk-free. Amnesty International reminds us that China has imprisoned more journalists and bloggers than any other state. Chinese officials can use Internet surveillance techniques to crack down on anyone who crosses an invisible line. China's "Internet" is less networked than most places in the world. All traffic flows through three fiber-optic cable nodes and then to the rest of the world. This gives the government significant power to block access to certain sources of data. China also employs several thousand officials who share the duty of policing Internet use, mostly in cafes. The government sponsors several important Internet firms, such as the search-engine company Baidu. And China extracts important provisions and promises from foreign companies that offer Internet services in China.

China offers foreign companies vast potential. There is no place in the world with greater opportunities for growth in market share, revenue, and human capital. The lure is irresistible. But, as Yahoo discovered, it can come at a high price. An activist named Wang Xiaoning used his Yahoo email account to distribute on email lists some anonymous writings criticizing the Chinese government for how it handled the events of May and June 1989 in and around Tiananmen Square. In September 2002 Chinese authorities arrested Wang and he began serving a 10-year sentence in 2003. During Wang's trial prosecutors introduced evidence obtained from Yahoo's China branch identifying Wang as the distributor of the incriminating messages. Then, in 2003 Chinese authorities arrested a dissident named Li Zhi and sentenced him to eight years for "inciting subversion." Again, Yahoo supplied the information needed to track Li's messages. Another, more famous case involved a poet and journalist named Shi Tao, who had sent an email revealing a Communist Party directive concerning Tiananmen Square dissidents to someone in the United States. Shi was well known to Chinese authorities for his criticisms of human rights abuses. So when Yahoo revealed his email account information to Chinese authorities they were able to track Shi as the source of the offending email. Shi was sentenced to 10 years in prison in April 2005.

Once word reached the United States that Yahoo was complicit in the persecution of political dissidents, a furor ensued. Yahoo has faced a lawsuit filed by human rights organizations, widespread criticism among bloggers and activists, shareholder objections, and a grilling by a U.S. Congressional committee examining the roles of American companies such as Yahoo, Cisco (which supplies the servers that facilitate much of the surveillance and site blocking in China), and Google. Yahoo, of course, defends its actions by saying that it may not violate the laws of a country in which it does business, and it cannot be held responsible if its users violate laws as well. Yahoo also claims that its larger, American affiliate owns only 40 percent of Yahoo-China. The majority owner of Yahoo-China is another Chinese search engine and service provider, Alibaba.com. Since 2005, Alibaba.com has assumed complete control over Yahoo in China.

In every discussion about the role and responsibilities of Internet companies in China, these dissidents' plight plays a central role. These cases have generated calls for American companies to forge a set of "best practices" or a "code of conduct" that would limit the extent to which they can be used by the Chinese government to violate basic human rights. Many American and European companies signed the Sullivan Principles, which established a code of just conduct, in the 1980s when the South African government practiced brutal oppression against its black majority. So far, foreign companies have failed to outline such provisions for China. The Yahoo saga, however, has cast a shadow onto Google as well, even though Google operates in a very different way in China.

Google's Decision

Google has not put itself in a position to turn over information about Chinese dissidents' email accounts. The company decided years ago not to host email services or any other service that might require such revelation to the government of the People's Republic of China. So the application of Yahoo's experience to an assessment of Google's role in China is inappropriate and unfair. That's not to absolve Google of any complicity in the censorious policies of China: the company certainly offers a filtered version of its search engine to Chinese users: Google.cn.

Before 2006 Google did not have servers or services located in the People's Republic of China. Chinese users could reach Google by connecting to google.com and its servers based in the United States. Of course, this meant that the Chinese censors could block the entire Google service if they decided that something offended or troubled them. This happened often between 2002 and 2006. Generally, having Google's data pass through the three central nodes and filters meant that Google was significantly slower than search engines that had servers based in China itself. Google was facing the prospect of being irrelevant to Chinese users, shut out of the potential to gather revenue from advertising in one of the fastest growing consumer economies in history, and facing irregular and arbitrary blackouts of its service for which the company would most likely be blamed. By late 2002 it became clear that Google was not going to be able to gain purchase in the Chinese market if it wished to retain its public commitment to free expression. "We faced a choice at that point," Google Vice President Elliot Schrage told a Congressional subcommittee in 2006. "Hold fast to our commitment to free speech and risk a long-term cut-off from our Chinese users, or compromise our principles by entering the Chinese market directly and subjecting ourselves to Chinese laws and regulations." So for a while, at least, Google stayed out of China. Then, in 2005 the company began a series of discussions with government and human rights leaders in an effort to construct a model that would allow Google to offer dependable service in China without putting itself or its users in danger.

The company launched Google.cn in 2006. The new service is based in China, so it works quickly and is tailored to local needs and search habits. In addition, the search results reveal to users that certain sites have been blocked or removed by the state - there is no mystery and confusion about the source of censorship. Most importantly, Google does not operate any services that could put users in jeopardy. Chinese users of Gmail and Blogger must sign in through the US-based Chinese-language sites of google.com. And search results generated by google.com remain unfiltered and uncensored. As a result, of course, the Chinese government still frequently blocks access to Youtube and Blogger with those mysterious messages that "the connection has timed out."

Are Corporations bound by International Human Rights Standards?

Google would be foolish to abandon the Chinese market. In fact, it would commit something close to commercial malpractice to avoid or vacate China. Google is not a free-speech engine. It is an advertising company. It is also a publicly traded corporation with a duty to provide returns to its shareholders. And while both the company and its critics in the human rights community profess a shared commitment to free speech, Google can't possible rise to the level of its own rhetoric on such matters.

In many areas of speech and in many places in the world, Google compromises in appropriate ways, usually to conform to local laws. In Germany and France Google limits access to sites that promote anti-Semitism. In most of the world Google limits access to images that display significant amounts of human skin. In the United States, Google quickly removes videos from YouTube if a few people flag them as "inappropriate." And because United States copyright law makes it easy to remove a potentially infringing digital file from any Web server, copyright can be an effective tool of censorship as well. Now, it's hardly fair to compare the practice of conforming to decency and copyright laws in relatively liberal nations with the participation in widespread practices of political censorship in places like China. The cases might be similar in design but not in magnitude. But the company invites such a comparison by consistently asserting - no matter the context or issue - that it conforms to local laws and standards in matters of censorship. If you have a problem, the company is saying, take it up with local officials.

Still, for some reason, Google officials insist on claiming that the company is committed to the principles of free speech, and that such policies are exceptions rather than widely practiced standards. This contradiction lies at the friction point of Google's public philosophy, what it says and believes about itself and how it negotiates its positions and practices around the world. Certainly, Google is bound to conform to the laws of the countries in which it operates. So if Chinese officials demand that Google remove access to certain sites or subjects, the company claims it must obey. Human rights groups, on the other hand, counter that obeying Chinese law means obeying all of Chinese law, and the constitution of the People's Republic of China guarantees free speech. So Google, they say, is choosing to conform to Chinese laws in a way that causes it the least trouble and inconvenience.

This contradiction and the broad and loud public outcry over the Yahoo decision to expose activists to persecution have generated a firm call for a shared "code of conduct" for global Internet corporations that deal with China. Still, it's not clear whether companies face enough pressure in North America and Western Europe to counter the potential revenues that China offers. Holding fast to principle might be easier with a smaller and more oppressive country such as Burma or Saudi Arabia.

In recent decades, as global corporations have grown in influence around the world, human rights lawyers and theorists have been working to spread the umbrella of human rights law wide enough to cover corporate actors under the same obligations that bind states. The roles of the diamond industry in the slaughters and civil wars of Central Africa, petroleum companies such as Shell in the support of the totalitarian junta in Burma, and mining companies in the degradation of places like Irian Jaya in Indonesia have sparked strong reaction. The connection between the interests of these companies and the brutality that exists in these places is impossible to deny. So far, this effort has not yielded tangible results. There is scant legal foundation for bringing companies to justice for cooperating with states in the oppression of their own people. In addition, states sign human rights treaties. Companies do not. Still, legal reformers are pushing to expand the reach of laws and jurisdictions to cover such sins and treat them as crimes.

The Argument for Engagement

During that debate on National Public Radio in November 2008, Harvard computer science professor Harry Lewis accused Google of violating its "Don't be Evil" motto by creating Google.cn along the very lines that the Chinese government demanded. "Their choice was, to accept the Chinese ultimatum or to go home. They could have gone home but they didn't. They stated and built the engine as the Chinese wanted it." Lewis concluded, "Google didn't choose the lesser of two evils when faced with the Chinese ultimatum. It chose the more profitable of the two evils." Now, Lewis was making a debater's point because, well, this was a debate. The question before the two panels was not whether Google on balance does more bad than good or good than bad. It was whether Google lived up to its motto. The Chinese deal gives Google critics - and my debating team - an easy shot. Perhaps it's a cheap shot. But that is what debating is all about.

Esther Dyson responded to Lewis. Dyson is known as one of the central visionaries of the information age. She has been present at the creation of many of the most important initiatives of the Internet, including the gestation of several search engines. She is one of the brightest and most influential thinkers about digital technologies and their effects on the world. Dyson understandably believes in the transformative, perhaps revolutionary, power of information technology. "The great virtue of the Internet is that it erodes power, it sucks power out of the center, and takes it to the periphery, it erodes the power of institutions over people, while giving to individuals the power to run their own lives. Google is part of that. It's one of these things that shines light on everything, it enables people to find stuff out, it enables them to question what their governments are doing, and it's absolutely wonderful," Dyson told the debate crowd in New York City. "Google by its very presence and its operation, even if it's incomplete, creates increasing expectations for transparency, it starts people answering questions. It gets them to expect to be able to find out stuff."

As I wrote in Chapter 1, I was sitting at the opposite table to Dyson. I was on Harry Lewis' side of this constructed event. If the question at hand was whether Google violated its motto, I have to come down on Lewis' side, as I was in fact on Lewis' side. But in the real world, debates like this don't matter much. To the people of China, Google's fidelity to its motto doesn't make a bit of difference. In the real world, Dyson has a much stronger point. Google might raise expectations. Google might spark some young person in China to ask one more question about why she can't read this or watch that. Some Google is probably a little better for China than no Google.

But in fact, the case that the Internet or Google could change China is about as fantastic a notion as one that asserts Google's absence from China would make a difference to anyone. Let's face it: Google would be stupid, irresponsible, in fact, to leave all that potential Chinese money on the table. Some China is certainly a lot better for Google than no China.

At this point, however, it's just potential money, and it's just some China for Google. Google does not matter much in China right now. In 2009 Google controlled less that 21 percent of the China search market (as defined by the share of total searches; Google does much better as a share of search-based advertising revenue with 29.8 percent). That figure was more than two points lower than the last quarter of 2008, so Google's market share was actually falling slightly in China in 2008-2009. Overall, the number of searches within China rose 41.2 percent between the first quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009. So even with just 21 percent of the searches, there is a lot of business to be done and money to be made. Nonetheless, Google is hardly the cultural and political factor in China that it is in North America and Europe.

China's market leader, Baidu.com, controls more than 74 percent of the search market. There are many reasons for the dominance of Baidu. First and foremost, simply having an early lead in market share gives Baidu more data with which to customize search results and services. While Google holds back from China many of its most attractive services to avoid a Yahoo-like human rights dilemma, Baidu offers a wide array of locally based (and thus fast) services such as area-specific searches (online chat, children's material search, legal searches, government websites). As of mid-2009 Google.cn offered fewer search services and features than Baidu did. Baidu also appeals to the growing nationalistic spirit in China, as many young people are wary of the influence of multinational corporations and proud that a Chinese firm can best one of the most powerful and popular in the world. Baidu also has the advantage of building its code fundamentally and originally to serve searches in simplified Mandarin, while Google had to translate many of its tools and services for Mandarin. Perhaps most importantly, for several years Baidu has allowed its users to find unauthorized audio and video files easily, as China has notoriously lax copyright enforcement. In early 2009 Google announced a deal with major global music companies to offer cost-free authorized music downloads to users in China to compete with Baidu. Still, Google seems to be most popular among the cosmopolitan elite and international business people rather than young and poor people who make up both the vast majority of China in general and - more importantly - the vast majority of the potential growth in the market for Web services and search. With Baidu attracting far more use among far more people in China, there is no reason to believe that Google's market share will grow significantly over the next few years. But with a valuable slice of the market - those who buy and travel more - Google has the potential to continue increasing its revenue and share of total revenue even if its total market share continues to shrink.

Of all the ways that the government of the People's Republic of China has to censor, monitor, and oppress its citizens, Web search engines are largely unimportant. Among search engines, Google's lack of market power in China makes its role in the structures of oppression even less important that it might be in other places where it dominates Web search. In mid 2009 the Chinese government announced a new initiative to require the installation of content filtering programs on every personal computer in the country. The "Green Dam" system borrows elements of anti-pornography filtering software to allow for significant external monitoring, blocking, and even remote control of computers by installing serious security vulnerabilities. If the government succeeds in making "Green Dam" part of the standards for computers in China, then its censorship and surveillance plans will have one more powerful tool that renders Google less than relevant.

If you consider the wide array of tools that the Chinese government uses for security, surveillance, and censorship on the Internet, and you consider how small a factor Google is in China, then you can't help but conclude that Google does not matter much in matters of commerce, politics, or justice in China. So Esther Dyson is wrong to believe that Google's compromise with Chinese laws and standards can generate any measurable benefit to Chinese dissidents or promoters of religious freedom and democracy. The elites in China, those most likely to find value in using Google, are also most likely to be aware of the global human rights criticism, the technologies of censorship and surveillance, and the fate of the leaders of the uprisings in 1989. For the vast majority of people in China, the commercial and entertainment services that Baidu offers suffice. Just because Google.cn might offer a slice more of the complicating and troublesome political information available in the world does not mean there is sufficient demand for it. Web search, largely because of Google's expertise, now delivers to users almost exactly what they think they want. If they don't want to find trouble, they don't get it. Search is a filter, after all. The key to providing effective and attractive search services is to limit the number of surprises users will encounter. Search, therefore, is inherently conservative. Effective Web search thus inhibits social and political change.

Political change in China and elsewhere can only arrive when Chinese public culture demands it and presses the state at its points of greatest weakness. We make a grave mistake by trusting too much in technologies to change societies. Technologies are embedded in societies and cultures. They are not distinct and independent drivers.

The Many Voices of Google

The story of Google in China may not be a simple one of censorship and the struggle for liberations. After all, China is hardly the only example of a state effectively censoring Internet traffic and thwarting political dissent. As Internet scholar Rebecca MacKinnon wrote during the June 2009 crackdown on Google and other Internet services in China, "The Internet censorship club is expanding and now includes a growing number of democracies. Legislators are under growing pressure from family groups to 'do something' in the face of all the threats sloshing around the Internet, and the risk of overstepping is high." Germany was considering a national censorship system, through which Internet service providers would be required to block a secret list of sites. Australia and the United Kingdom have for a number of years maintained a similar national censorship list. While none of these states censor as pervasively, disruptively, or effectively as China does, it's clear that China has strong partners in efforts to restrict the use of the Internet for both pornography and politics. In each of these countries, Google follows orders from the state carefully and thus actively (albeit tangentially and grudgingly) participates in the censorship of the Internet. Even in the United States, digital copyright laws have forced Google to aid the Church of Scientology in its efforts to squelch Web critics. In addition, the United States has for a decade been requiring libraries and schools to install Web filter software similar to the "Green Dam" mandate in China for the same overt reason: to restrict access to sites suspected of supplying pornography. However, as with Green Dam, such software also restricts material of political significance. Measuring by scale or effect, it's improper to compare the Chinese efforts to restrict the flow of information with that of the United States and other democracies. But it's a mistake to single out China as the only significant place where Web censorship is a matter of policy.

This is not Google standing up for free speech. It could have done that years ago. It's about Google standing up against attacks. This is a much more serious issue.

I think we would all get a better grasp of what is going on to recognize that the censorship aspect of this conflict is a side show.

Google.cn censorship has never mattered -- not because of market share. Anyone who cared could reach Google.com by using proxy servers or VPN. Millions do. Besides, Google had a choice: censor Google.cn or break the law and get out of the largest market in the world.

Criticisms of Google for its China policies never made sense to me. They only make sense if you think companies should not be trying to make money.

So backing off of the old model will make no difference either. China will just kick Google out of the country if the showdown fails.

So Google should be applauded for taking a big risk here. But it's not egalitarian at all. It's about exposing China's nasty cyber attacks, general corporate insecurity (threatening the Cloud move, among many other things), and Google's lack of patience with China's habit of blocking YouTube and Blogger.

Google deserves credit for standing up against China's anti-Internet and anti-business policies. It has nothing to do with censorship and human rights.

Here is Jonathan Zittrain's reaction.

Here is the Google blog post from David Drummond.

Here are my thoughts on the move as it breaks:

It's commercial malpractice to back out of the largest market in the world on principle. Google must have some good business reasons.

Google has long managed to conduct a search business within China while keeping potentially sensitive operations such as mail, YouTube, and blogger outside the People's Republic. This has allowed Google to do business with the largest market in the world and has insulated it from collaborating in the oppression of dissidents.

Google learned much from Yahoo's mistakes. And I think Google has been running its China operations with the utmost integrity. If Google were to pull out of China, it would have to be for some very good business reasons. It has those reasons now. China has been launching nasty attacks on its system. It frequently blocks important services that Google hosts overseas. China has made it very clear that Google should not expect a reasonable business environment in which to work.

So don't buy any lines about Google's commitment to free speech or not being evil. That's not the plane on which this is happening.

The key here is that Google is threatening to pull Google.cn out of reach of the millions of elite, cosmopolitan users within the People's Republic. Most Chinese Web users use Baidu. But Google is the choice of those who travel, do business overseas, or are expats from the United States or Europe. Those people have some pull with the Chinese government. And they will want their Google.cn.

So don't expect Google to pull out any time soon. The threat to do so might be big enough to make a difference to the cosmopolitan business class. And that might be enough to make a difference to the government

According to a new patent that was just granted to Google, the company could soon extend the reach of its advertising program in Google Maps to Street View. This patent, which was originally filed on July 7, 2008, describes a new system for promoting ads in online mapping applications. In this patent, Google describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards in these images and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with more up-to-date ads. In addition, Google also seems to plan an advertising auction for unclaimed properties.

Click here to listen.


Vaidhyanathan, Siva



January 2010

MTWRF, 0930-1200 WB119

Course Description:

This course will consider the ways that the rise of search engines has affected how we view the world, conduct commerce, and communicate. The reading will combine political economy approaches, popular journalistic accounts, and cultural analyses of search engines.

I suggest the following books for preparation for the week we get together. They are not required but would be very helpful for background.

• Alexander Halavais, Search engine society (Cambridge; Malden MA: Polity, 2009).

• John Battelle, The search : how Google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005).

• Jeff Jarvis, What would Google do? (New York, NY: Collins Business, 2009).

• Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization Of Everything: How One Company is Transforming Culture, Commerce, and Community -- and Why We Should Worry (Profile Books, 2010). (I will distribute PDFs of this)

Recommended: Watch all the videos here:

• http://world-information.org/wii/deep_search/en/videos

During the week of January 18-22, please read the following (available on the Web and through the library):

For Monday:

• Eszter Hargittai, "The Social, Political, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions of Search Engines: An Introduction," Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12, no. 3 (2007): 1.
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue3/hargittai.html

• Greg Lastowka, "Google's Law," SSRN eLibrary, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1017536.

For Tuesday:

• Michael Zimmer, "The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0," 2008, 2008, http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2136/1944.

For Wednesday:

• Frank A. Pasquale, "Rankings, Reductionism, and Responsibility," Seton Hall Public Law Research Paper No. 888327 (2006), http://ssrn.com/paper=888327.

For Thursday:

• Randal C. Picker, "Competition and Privacy in Web 2.0 and the Cloud," U of Chicago Law & Economics, no. 414 (June 26, 2008), http://ssrn.com/paper=1151985.

For Friday:

• Frank A. Pasquale and Oren Bracha, "Federal Search Commission? Access, Fairness and Accountability in the Law of Search," Cornell Law Review (September 2008), http://ssrn.com/paper=1002453.

Assignment:

Due Tuesday, January 26 submitted to me via email: Write a 10-page paper analyzing and criticizing two published law review articles that have some bearing on search engine law. Note the intersections, agreements, disagreements, and differences in evidence used by each. Ideally you should highlight a significant gap in the scholarship and propose a study to fill it. Think of this paper as the background section to a law review article you might write.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siva_Vaidhyanathan




This class is an introduction to digital media studies. It explores 
the ways digital media have had an impact on various aspects of
contemporary culture such as concepts of community, communication,
identity, privacy, property, and so on. The class takes a political
economy approach, but our questions will be informed by a variety of 
theoretical perspectives including cultural studies, media studies,
and technology studies. The course is grounded in the history and
theory of media technology as a site of cultural production.

The 
class is a prerequisite for both the major and minor in Media Studies.



Here are some of the questions we will ask during this course:



• What is a network?


• What are its features?


• What are its flaws?


• And what's so "new" about "New Media?"

• How is the Internet regulated?

• How should the Internet be regulated?

• What is "artificial intelligence" and why does it matter?



This course will approach each of these questions through a
consideration of some key texts in cyberculture, new media studies,
and “Critical Information Studies.” It will begin with a series of
descriptions of some common networks: the "Internet;" "peer-to-peer"
networks; "social networking" sites and software; "Web 2.0"; etc.
Students will be encouraged to use Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Google
Video, blogs, Wikipedia as laboratories for
exploring networked communication and the principles of new media.



Requirements:

You must submit the quizzes and exams.
You must be registered in and attend a lab.
Weekly readings will be the basis of class lecture and discussion.
If you miss three lab sections you will be subject to a failing grade for your lab project.



Exams will contain a combination of short-answer and essay questions
and will demand a mastery of the assigned reading. Midterm essay
questions will be posted the week before the midterms. Final essay
questions will be posted two weeks before the final. All questions will require knowledge of the
readings, arguments, issues, and case studies discussed in lecture.
No lecture notes will be posted since lectures will include
discussions that cannot be scripted in advance.

Lab sessions will be used to discuss the readings and experiment with
various methods of networked digital communication.

Readings:
 
All reading materials for class are listed in this
 syllabus.  If a link fails to work, let the instructor know by email. Additional 
readings may be assigned during the semester. You are responsible for 
reading the materials in the syllabus and coming to lecture ready to
discuss the issues set in discussion.



Grades:
• Five quizzes (Collab): 20 points each = 100 points
• Three exams: 100 points each = 300 points
• Optional group project: = 100 points to be averaged in with the other 400 points

All quizzes will be taken in lab. All exams will be take-home on Collab. The deadlines will be announced later.

There will be no extensions. No exceptions. Don’t ask.




Optional Group Projects:



Students who opt to do the group project shall form groups of four to six people. That group MUST have every member taught by the SAME TA. There will be no exceptions to this.

Students who choose to pursue this project must pass a special quiz about copyright and personality rights and clearances. They must attend the appropriate courses sponsored by SHANTI and the Robertson Media Center.

Each group will collaborate on the production of a piece of digital work. Each group will produce a five- to 10-minute video about the uses and
abuses of digital technology in the university environment. In addition, the group must create a Web page to frame or host the video.

The Web page should contain the following information:

• Course information
• Participants
• Background information (about 200 words)
• Links to important and useful Web resources about the subject
• Disclaimers, licenses, etc. explaining copyright, privacy, permissions, etc.

Please give a one-sentence proposal to your TA by February 14.


Please give a seven-sentence proposal (that would reflect a change in
subject or project option) to your TA by the week of March 1.

The 
seven sentences should indicate the scope and subject, the division 
of labor, the method of research, steps in production, and the plans
for publication, publicity, and distribution.



The optional group projects are due on May 1. They will be submitted by sending an email with the page link to the professor and TA.

Evaluation and Policies:



A:    Rare and outstanding work that shows thought, enterprise, and
attention to detail (spelling, grammar, structure, citations). Do not
expect an A in this class.



B:     Very good work that shows care for and understanding of the
material.



C:    Fair work that demonstrates a pedestrian or superficial
familiarity with the material in the class or is presented in a
sloppy fashion.



D:     Unsatisfactory work that demonstrates a lack of understanding
of the reading or lectures.



F:    Failure because work was not submitted, the student missed more
than three sessions, or the student committed an abrogation of
academic trust and a commitment to honesty.



Etiquette:

 A polite and respectful environment is essential to the success of
any class (and any professional relationship). We expect and demand
that students will treat us and peers with the utmost respect. We
will not tolerate insults or taunts in class. We will abruptly wake
up a student who dozes off and ask her or him to leave the class for
the day. If a mobile phone should ring in class, we will pause to
allow the owner to turn off the ring. And we will consider such
carelessness to be very rude. So please turn off all potentially
 annoying devices.



A special note on Facebook use: I have a Facebook profile and use it
 often. However, I would ask that you not add me as a friend on Facebook until you have graduated from UVa. I do not want to be flooded
 with dozens of requests during the semester. If, after your time at UVa 
has ended, you still like me, then please feel free to request a
 friendship on Facebook.


 

Readings:



Students will read and comment on the following:



Articles:



Anderson, Chris. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired, June 23, 2008. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory.

Barlow, John. “Declaring Indepondence.” Wired. 4, no. 6 (1996): 121. http://wac.colostate.edu/rhetnet/barlow/barlow_declaration.html.  

Bartow, Ann. "Some Peer-to-Peer, Democratically and Voluntarily
Produced Thoughts About 'the Wealth of Networks: How Social
Production Transforms Markets and Freedom,' by Yochai Benkler." 
Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law, (2007),
 http://ssrn.com/paper=964735



Benkler, Yochai. 2006. Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and
Challenge.  In The Wealth of Networks (Yale University Press, 2006)
 http://www.congo-education.net/wealth-of-networks/ch-01.htm



Benkler, Yochai. 2006. Chapter 3: Peer Production and Sharing.  In,
The Wealth of Networks, 
http://www.congo-education.net/wealth-of-networks/ch-03.htm



Benkler, Yochai, and Christian Ahlert. "Mining the Wealth of Networks
with Yochai Benkler " OpenDemocracy.net, no.  (2006),
 http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-copyrightlaw/benkler_3487.jsp



boyd, danah. "Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing Community into
Being on Social Network Sites "  First Monday, no. 12 (2006), 
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_12/boyd/index.html



boyd, danah. "Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?" The
Knowledge Tree, no. 13 (2007),
 http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2007/?page_id=28



Carr, Nick. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008. Available at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google



Cohen, Julie. E. “Cyberspace as/and Space.” 107 Colum. L. Rev. 210 (2007)
Available at
 http://www.columbialawreview.org/articles/index.cfm?article_id=850



Crawford, Susan P. , "The Radio and the Internet" (August 14, 2007).
Cardozo Legal Studies Research Paper Series Available at SSRN: 
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1007221



Farrell, Henry, ed.. "The Wealth of Networks Seminar." Crooked
Timber, no.  (2006),
 http://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/30/introduction-the-wealth-of-network
s-seminar/


Hoofnagle, Chris Jay. “Beyond Google and evil: How policy makers, journalists and consumers should talk differently about Google and privacy.” First Monday 14, no. 4 (April 6, 2009). http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2326/2156.  

Ito, et al. Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media. Chicago: McArthur Foundation, 2008. Available at http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/report



O'Reilly, Tim. "What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models
for the Next Generation of Software." O'Reilly, no. May 8 (2005),
 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-we
b-20.html

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. “Naked in the 'Nonopticon': Surveillance and marketing combine to strip away our privacy.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 15, 2008, sec. The Chronicle Review. http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i23/23b00701.htm.

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. “Generational Myth.” Chronicle of Higher Education 55, no. 4 (September 2008).  

Wu, Tim. "The Wrong Tail: How to Turn a Powerful Idea into a Dubious
Theory of Everything." Slate.com, no. July 21 (2006), 
http://www.slate.com/id/2146225/



Wu, Tim and Yoo, Christopher S., "Keeping the Internet Neutral?: Tim
Wu and Christopher Yoo Debate" (December 28, 2006). Vanderbilt Public
Law Research Paper No. 06-27 Available at SSRN:
 http://ssrn.com/abstract=953989




Books available at UVa Bookstore:


Abelson, Harold, Ken Ledeen, and Harry R. Lewis. Blown to bits : your life, liberty, and happiness after the digital explosion. Upper Saddle River NJ: Addison-Wesley, 2008.  

Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail : The Revolution Changing Small
Markets into Big Business.  New York: Hyperion, 2006.



Bauerlein, Mark. The Dumbest Generation. New York: Tarcher Penguin, 2008.

Fritz, Sandy, ed. Understanding artificial intelligence. New York: Warner Books, 2002.  

Jarvis, Jeff. What would Google do? New York, NY: Collins Business, 2009.  

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: Penguin, 2008.



Sunstein, Cass R. Republic 2.0. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.



Zittrain, Jonathan. The Future of the Internet. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.


Books available in PDF form on Collab:

Bishop, Mark. Views into the Chinese room : new essays on Searle and artificial intelligence. Oxford [u.a.]: Clarendon Press [u.a.], 2002.  

Hey, Anthony, ed. The fourth paradigm data-intensive scientific discovery. Redmond, Wash. :: Microsoft Research,, 2009.  

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The anarchist in the library : how the clash between freedom and control is hacking the real world and crashing the system. New York: Basic Books, 2004.  

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010

Books available on Ebrary via UVa Library (reading software required):

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and copywrongs : the rise of intellectual property and how it threatens creativity. New York [u.a.]: Univ. Press, 2003.  

Class Schedule (NOTE: EVERYTHING BELOW IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE)



1) January 21: What the heck are “Digital Media Studies”?


Read:
 

Vaidhyanathan, “Critical Information Studies: A Manifesto”
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=g743885185~db=all

   

Vaidhyanathan, “Generational Myth,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 19, 2008. Available at http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i04/04b00701.htm


 
No Lab sessions this week.

2)

Week of January 26:   What are digital media doing to us?
   


Read:

 

Carr, Nick. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008. Available at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google


 

Shirky, Clay. “Why Abundance is Good: A Reply to Nick Carr.” Brittanica Online. Available at http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/07/why-abundance-is-good-a-reply-to-nick-carr/



“Britannica Online Forum: Is Google Making us Stupid?.” Britannica Online. Available at http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/07/this-is-your-brain-this-is-your-brain-on-the-internetthe-nick-carr-thesis/




FIRST QUIZ

3) Week of February 2: Online identities, societies, and communities
    


Read:



boyd, danah. "Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing Community into
Being on Social Network Sites "  First Monday, no. 12 (2006),
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_12/boyd/index.html

 

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.


4) Week of February 9: Digital Youth?

  

Read:

Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation


Abelson, Harold, Ken Ledeen, and Harry R. Lewis. Blown to bits : your life, liberty, and happiness after the digital explosion. Upper Saddle River NJ: Addison-Wesley, 2008.  Chapter 7



Ito, et al.Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media. Chicago: McArthur Foundation, 2008. Available at http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/report

SECOND QUIZ



5) Week of February 16: What's so special about Digital Media?
    


Read:
Abelson, Harold, Ken Ledeen, and Harry R. Lewis. Blown to bits : your life, liberty, and happiness after the digital explosion. Upper Saddle River NJ: Addison-Wesley, 2008.  Chapters 1, 3, 5

   O'Reilly, Tim. "What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business
Models for the Next Generation of Software." O'Reilly, no. May 8
(2005),
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-we
b-20.html

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. "Me? Person of the Year? No Thanks." MSNBC.com, December 28, 2006. Available at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16371425/

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. "Why Thomas Jefferson would Love Napster," MSNBC.com, July 3, 2001. Available at http://elastico.net/copyfight/upload/siva_jefferson.pdf

FIRST EXAM

6)  Week of February 23: Intellectual Property and Free Software
Read:
Abelson, Harold, Ken Ledeen, and Harry R. Lewis. Blown to bits : your life, liberty, and happiness after the digital explosion. Upper Saddle River NJ: Addison-Wesley, 2008.  Chapter 6.

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and copywrongs : the rise of intellectual property and how it threatens creativity. New York [u.a.]: Univ. Press, 2003.  


7) Week of March 2 (Texas Independence Day): Governing the Internet

Read:
Zittrain, Jonathan. The Future of the Internet.
Barlow, John. “Declaring Indepondence.” Wired. 4, no. 6 (1996): 121. http://wac.colostate.edu/rhetnet/barlow/barlow_declaration.html.  


THIRD QUIZ

8) Week of March 9:  Spring Break


9) Week of March 16: The Googlization of the Internet
Read:

Jarvis, Jeff. What would Google do? New York, NY: Collins Business, 2009.  
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010


9) Week of March 22: No class.


SECOND EXAM

10) Week of March 30:

Surveillance and Privacy

Read:

Abelson, Harold, Ken Ledeen, and Harry R. Lewis. Blown to bits : your life, liberty, and happiness after the digital explosion. Upper Saddle River NJ: Addison-Wesley, 2008.  Chapter 2

boyd, danah. "Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?" The Knowledge Tree, no. 13 (2007), http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2007/?page_id=28

Hoofnagle, Chris Jay. “Beyond Google and evil: How policy makers, journalists and consumers should talk differently about Google and privacy.” First Monday 14, no. 4 (April 6, 2009). http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2326/2156.  

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. “Naked in the 'Nonopticon': Surveillance and marketing combine to strip away our privacy.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 15, 2008, sec. The Chronicle Review. http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i23/23b00701.htm.


11) Week of April 6: Is this a new economic age?
   

Read:

   

Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail : The Revolution Changing
Small Markets into Big Business. 1st ed. New York: Hyperion, 2006.

   

Wu, Tim. "The Wrong Tail: How to Turn a Powerful Idea into a
Dubious Theory of Everything." Slate.com, no. July 21 (2006),
http://www.slate.com/id/2146225/



FOURTH QUIZ

10) Week of April 13: Is this a new social and political age?


    Read:



Benkler, Yochai. 2006. Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and 
Challenge.  In The Wealth of Networks (Yale University Press, 2006)
http://www.congo-education.net/wealth-of-networks/ch-01.htm

Benkler, Yochai. 2006.

Chapter 3: Peer Production and Sharing.  In,
The Wealth of Networks, 
http://www.congo-education.net/wealth-of-networks/ch-03.htm



Benkler, Yochai, and Christian Ahlert. "Mining the Wealth of Networks
with Yochai Benkler " OpenDemocracy.net, no.  (2006),
http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-copyrightlaw/benkler_3487.jsp



Bartow, Ann. "Some Peer-to-Peer, Democratically and Voluntarily
Produced Thoughts About 'the Wealth of Networks: How Social
Production Transforms Markets and Freedom,' by Yochai Benkler." 
Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law, (2007),
http://ssrn.com/paper=964735



Farrell, Henry, ed.. "The Wealth of Networks Seminar." Crooked
Timber, no.  (2006),
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/30/introduction-the-wealth-of-network
s-seminar/


11) Week of April 20: Is this a new scientific age?

Read:

Anderson, Chris. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired, June 23, 2008. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory.

Hey, Anthony, ed. The fourth paradigm data-intensive scientific discovery. Redmond, Wash. :: Microsoft Research,, 2009.  

FIFTH QUIZ



12) Week of April 27: Is this a new human age?

Bishop, Mark. Views into the Chinese room : new essays on Searle and artificial intelligence. Oxford [u.a.]: Clarendon Press [u.a.], 2002.  

Fritz, Sandy, ed. Understanding artificial intelligence. New York: Warner Books, 2002.  

OPTIONAL GROUP PROJECT DUE MAY 1

13) Week of May 4:  The Digital Republic?
Read:
Sunstein, Cass R. Republic.com 2.0. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2007.



Final Exam due in Collab (of your LAB SECTION) by midnight on May 9.

In the next CNBC Original, Maria Bartiromo takes viewers Inside The Mind of Google for a rare look at the world's most powerful technology company and its crown jewel, the Google Internet search engine. This is the fascinating story of how two grad students, in barely a decade, took a one-time research project and turned it into a global technology powerhouse...changing the way we interact with information, the Internet, and each other. See how Google came to dominate the search industry and turn it into a profit machine... and see where it's taking its next step... and how the company plans to address arguably the biggest controversy in today's digital age: privacy.

SHOW TIMES
Premieres Thursday, December 3rd 9p | 10p | 12a | 1a ET

I don't think there is a legal or regulatory question here. But there should be.

Murdoch's properties are not that important to the Google experience or revenue stream. So it's Murdoch's loss to gamble on BING. BING is all about shopping, so WSJ would be an odd fit over there.

Basically, Murdoch is just bluffing and blustering while trying to get a better global deal from Google.

It does point out the need for search-standard regulations because if it were to succeed and spread, the fracturing of Web content among exclusive deals with search engines would severely disrupt the quality of the overall Web.