Google vs. China
It’s always enthralling when two heavyweights square up against each other – eyes locked, jaws jutting forward, chests out – but when in one corner is the somewhat paranoid government of the planet’s new superpower and in the other the undisputed champion of cyberspace, the potential confrontation is not just fascinating but potentially far-reaching in its consequences for all the world’s ‘net-izens.’
In 2006, when Google launched its almost ubiquitous search engine service in China, the “Do No Evil” champions of free enterprise and free speech were widely criticized for selling out by agreeing to let the Chinese authorities install filters on the system allowing them to censor content.
In the interest of establishing a foothold in the fastest growing Internet market in the world Google agreed - possibly in the hope that greater contact between China and the rest of the world would help reduce tensions and lead to greater internal freedom of speech. Much as the International Olympic Committee fatuously hoped for.
In March 2009 China blocked access to Google’s YouTube, and a few months later Chinese officials accused Google of disseminating obscene material, leading to various Google services, including Gmail, being temporarily blacked out. Tensions rose in October 2009, when a group of Chinese authors accused Google of violating copyrights with its digital library and threatened to sue.
Then on January 12 things came to a head when the search engine company announced they had discovered an attack on company servers originating in China, which was fairly clearly aimed at gaining access to the e-mail data of Chinese advocates for human rights. They also announced that they were no longer willing to comply with China’s search engine censorship requirements, leading directly to the current deadlock.
At this point the US State Department also got involved. Although Secretary of State Hillary Clinton didn’t mention China by name, she recently made a statement that “countries or individuals that engage in cyber-attacks should face consequences and international condemnation.”
Chinese government spokespeople tried to defuse the situation by downplaying it, proclaiming at the same time that they didn’t care much either way what Google decided to do, but have invited Google to resolve the dispute by legal means within China. Google’s response so far has been a public commitment to eliminate all censorship – something they know won’t fly under the current regime.
The latest public shots were fired on Thursday this week, when Google – who along with Microsoft, Intel and AT&T are official sponsors of an organization called The Privacy Project – launched the inaugural International Data Privacy Day on 28 January, and used the occasion to publish their five-point “Privacy Principles.”
These include a commitment to: “develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices”; to “make the collection of personal information transparent,” and to “be a responsible steward of the information we hold.” A responsibility which clearly keeps them on a collision course with whoever sponsored the theft of personal data of dissenting Chinese citizens earlier this month.
While most of us are not under imminent danger of arrest, imprisonment and torture at the moment for expressing critical opinions of our governments, this is exactly what some individuals are facing as a result of the failure of Google to protect its users private information effectively.
And when one considers the massive amounts of information any user of Facebook is heedlessly feeding to some server that may be equally vulnerable, the potential power of an authoritarian Big Brother is disconcerting indeed.
Meanwhile, the adversaries are locked in that space in which backing down becomes increasingly damaging with each passing day, and the longer it takes to reach some form of accommodation heightens the possibility of a swift escalation in aggression. Who’ll blink first?
I don’t know who’s scarier - the Chinese government or Google itself. Have you read their ‘mission’ in the preamble to their Privacy Principles: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information.” Who the hell gave them the right? And they’re doing it - their power in controlling access to information online is almost absolute. They’re ubiquitous and unquestionable. On the internet, to be is to be seen - and Google controls who’s seen. Big Brother is here folks, more powerful than Orwell could have ever imagined.