The Googlization of Everything

The China Syndrome

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.