- US search engine agrees to government restrictions
- Firm admits inconsistency with its corporate ethics
Google Inc., the world’s biggest search engine, will team up with the world’s biggest censor, China; with a service that it hopes will make it more attractive to the country’s 110 million online users in order to gain greater access to China’s fast-growing market.
Google has offered a Chinese-language version of its search engine for years but users have been frustrated by government blocks on the site.
After holding out longer than any other major Internet Company, Google will effectively become another brick in the great firewall of China when it starts filtering out information that it believes the government will not approve of.
Despite a year of soul-searching, the American company will join Microsoft and Yahoo! in helping the communist government block access to websites containing politically sensitive content, such as references to the Tiananmen Square massacre and criticism of the politburo.
The new interface – google.cn – rolled out recently will be slowly phased in over the coming months. Although users will have the option of continuing to search via the original US-based google.com website, it is expected that the vast majority of Chinese search enquiries will go through mainland-based servers.
Critics warn the new version could restrict access to thousands of sensitive terms and web sites. Such topics are likely to include independence for Taiwan and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
The Chinese government keeps a tight rein on the internet and what users can access. The BBC news site is inaccessible, while a search on Google.cn for the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement directs users to a string of condemnatory articles.
Executives have grudgingly accepted that this is the ethical price they have to pay to base servers in mainland China, which will improve the speed – and attractiveness – of their service in a country where they face strong competition from the leading mandarin search engine, Baidu.
But Google faces a backlash from free speech advocates, internet activists and politicians, some of whom are already asking how the company’s policy in China accords with its mission statement: to make all possible information available to everyone who has a computer or mobile phone.
Google argued it would be more damaging to pull out of China altogether.
Google’s move in China comes less than a week after it resisted efforts by the US Department of Justice to make it disclose data on what people were searching for.
The move will require the company to abide by the rules of the world’s most restricted internet environment. China is thought to have 30,000 online police monitoring blogs; chatrooms and news portals. The propaganda department is thought to employ even more people, a small but increasing number of whom are paid to anonymously post pro-government comments online.
Sophisticated filters have been developed to block or limit access to "unhealthy information", which includes human rights websites, such as Amnesty, foreign news outlets, such as the BBC, as well as pornography. Of the 64 internet dissidents in prison worldwide, 54 are from China.
Because of government barriers set up to suppress information, Google’s China users previously have been blocked from using the search engine or encountered lengthy delays in response time.
The service troubles have frustrated many Chinese users, hobbling Google’s efforts to expand its market share in a country that expected to emerge as an Internet gold mine over the next decade.
Google has remained outside this system until now. But its search results are still filtered and delayed by the giant banks of government servers, known as the great firewall of China. Type "Falun Gong" in the search engine from a Beijing computer and the only results that can be accessed are official condemnations.
Baidu.com Inc., a Beijing-based company in which Google owns a 2.6 percent stake, currently runs China’s most popular search engine. But a recent Keynote Systems survey of China’s Internet preferences concluded that Baidu remains vulnerable to challenges from Google and Yahoo Inc.
To obtain the Chinese license, Google agreed to omit Web content that the country’s government finds objectionable. Google will base its censorship decisions on guidance provided by Chinese government officials.
Now, however, Google will actively assist the government to limit content. There are technical precedents. In Germany, Google follows government orders by restricting references to sites that deny the Holocaust. In France, it obeys local rules prohibiting sites that stir up racial hatred. And in the US, it assists the authorities’ crackdown on copyright infringements.
The scale of censorship in China is likely to dwarf anything the company has done before. According to one internet media insider, the main taboos are the three Ts: Tibet, Taiwan and the Tiananmen massacre, and the two Cs: cults such as Falun Gong and criticism of the Communist party. But this list is frequently updated.
Google officials characterized the censorship concessions in China as an excruciating decision for a company that adopted "do not be evil" as a motto. But management believes it is a worthwhile sacrifice.
We firmly believe, with our culture of innovation, Google can make meaningful and positive contributions to the already impressive pace of development in China, said Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s senior policy counsel.
In a statement, Google said it had little choice: To date, our search service has been offered exclusively from outside China, resulting in latency and access issues that have been unsatisfying to our Chinese users and, therefore, unacceptable to Google.
With google.cn, Chinese users will ultimately receive a search service that is fast, always accessible, and helps them find information both in China and from around the world.
It acknowledged that this goes contrary to its corporate ethics, but said a greater good was served by providing information in China. In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on google.cn, in response to local law, regulation or policy. While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information is more inconsistent with our mission.
Julian Pain of Reporters Without Borders – a freedom of expression advocacy group that also has its website blocked in China – accused Google of hypocrisy.
This is very bad news for the internet in China. Google were the only ones who held out. So the Chinese government had to block information themselves. But now Google will do it for them, he said. They have two standards. One for the US, where they resist government demands for personal information and one for China, where they are helping the authorities block thousands of websites.
In an attempt to be more transparent than its rivals, Google said it would inform users that certain web pages had been removed from the list of results on the orders of the government. The company provides similar alerts in Germany and France when, to comply with national laws, it censors results to remove references to Nazi paraphernalia.
But its motivation is economic: a chunk of the fast-growing Chinese search market, estimated to be worth $151m (£84m) in 2004. This is still small by US standards, but with the number of web users increasing at the rate of more than 20 million a year, the online population is on course to overtake the US within the next decade.
Initially, Google will not use Chinese servers for two of its most popular services: Gmail and blogger. This is a reflection of the company’s discomfort with the harsh media environment – and the subsequent risks to its corporate image.
Local bloggers were already wearily resigned to the change. What Google are doing is targeting commercial interests and skirting political issues, said one of the country’s most prominent, who writes under the name Black Hearted Killer.
When a search engine collaborates with the government like this, it makes it much easier for the Chinese government to control what is being said on the Internet.
"That by itself is no cause for criticism, but there is no doubt they are cowards."
The number of internet search users in China is predicted to increase from about 100 million currently to 187 million in two years’ time.
Last year, Yahoo was accused of supplying data to China that was used as evidence to jail a Chinese journalist for 10 years.
- Forbidden Searches:
Words or phrases that can trigger pages to be blocked or removed from search results:
Tiananmen Square Massacre
The killing of hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians by the People’s Liberation Army in 1989
Dalai Lama
The exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, who is denounced as a separatist by the government in Beijing
Taiwanese Independence
The nightmare of the Communist party, which has vowed to use force to prevent a breakaway
Falun Gong
A banned spiritual movement, thousands of whose members have been imprisoned and in many cases tortured
Dongzhou
The village where paramilitary police shot and killed at least three protesters last month
By creating a unique address for China, Google hopes to make its search engine more widely available and easier to use in the world’s most populous country.