Google, the world’s biggest search engine, will team up with the
world’s biggest censor, China, today with a service that it hopes
will make it more attractive to the country’s 110 million online
users.
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.
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.
The new interface — google.cn — started at midnight last
night and 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.
This 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.
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.
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.
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 ran 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.”
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.
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. 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.
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.”
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. “That by itself
is no cause for criticism, but there is no doubt they are cowards.”
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 splittist
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
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