Arcadia Foundation

Google’s dramatic threat to close its business in China unless the authorities allow it to provide uncensored search results throws into stark relief the limits to globalization.

The dream of  google spearheading the initiative to unify the World Wide Web by flattening the Earth into a single cyberspace has been shattered by that governments’ determination to control the information their citizens see.

The search engine and e-mail behemoth yesterday stated that  it had uncovered “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China” aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

The level of censorship is of course no surprise. Whilst in Beijing, our Public Relations Director personally found it difficult to access certain news websites, sometimes at such a delay he could “swear someone was picking up the metaphorical reciever along the way to check” on him.

Google’s new refusal to submit to such controls in China illustrates how its global business model could flounder in an international clash of values.

“Google is a powerful example of a company struggling to navigate the intersection between the Internet, globalization, and geopolitics,” says John Palfrey, a law professor at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society.

In the light of the attack, “we have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn [the company’s Chinese website],” Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said in a statement. “We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn.”

“The idea that Google would be allowed to run an uncensored search engine would be inconsistent with everything the Chinese government has done and every single statement it has made over the past year” about the need for controls on the internet, says Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on new media in China.

“The Internet in China is a police state just like China is a police state,” she adds. “Google’s presence helped to legitimize and normalize censorship, and to their credit they seem to be re-thinking this.”

The cyberattacks on their software, which Google implied came from official Chinese sources, “was the last straw,” says Danny Sullivan, who runs Search Engine Land, a website devoted to reporting on search-engine companies, based in California. “They got incredibly frustrated with China and got fed up,” he suggests.

Google’s closure threat highlights how “we are going to have a Balkanized network with different rules in different places,” says Professor Palfrey. An ongoing study of 70 countries shows “a clear trend toward more Internet censorship and more controls at national borders,” he says.

“Companies like Google are going to have to deal with that, but Google is saying there is a limit,” Palfrey adds. “It is a very important concept that there may be such a limit.”

Though Google said Tuesday its business in China is “immaterial” to its estimated $22 billion annual revenues, turning its back on the world’s biggest Internet market could seriously compromise the company’s future earnings.

Instead, says Mr. Sullivan, Google engineers might turn to “trying to help the Chinese get to Google” on servers outside the country, by punching a hole through the “Great Firewall” that blocks content unacceptable to Beijing.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was one of several top American IT executives who met United States Secretary of State Hilary Clinton last week as she draws up plans to help citizens abroad get uncensored access to the Internet. She is due to unveil a technological policy initiative on Internet freedom next week.

“Our policies on Internet freedom in part are a response to the fact that there are countries around the world that systematically stifle their citizens’ access to information,” Clinton aide Alec Ross told Reuters on Tuesday.

This could pit the US government and US companies directly against China, take the battle to new heights, and transform the nature of the Internet.

If China went beyond simply censoring search-engine results to block Google’s ability to search and index resources on the Chinese Web, “we would be entering a completely new era for the Internet,” says Rafal Rohozinski, a researcher with SecDev, a cyber-investigative consultancy based in Ottawa, Canada.

While Beijing accepted international trade rules to join the World Trade Organization and a globalized economy, it will not adopt international standards on information freedom any time soon, predicts Professor Jiang.

“In the long run, they cannot control information, and they will have to find ways to accommodate dissident views,” Jiang says. “But at the moment, they have no other way but censorship.”

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