Search and China
by David
In January 2006, Google released a Chinese version [google.cn] of its search engine. On the surface, this was unremarkable; after all, the company managed foreign language search domains in a plethora of countries, including Spain, Germany, Italy, and Japan. Indeed, most experts, including John Battelle, had long speculated as to the time when Google would launch a Mandarin-enabled site to compete with Yahoo, Microsoft, and other domestic firms who were quickly developing a stranglehold in the Chinese search market.
But google.cn would be very different than google.com – foremost in that Chinese search results would be censored by the company to appease Chinese internet authorities. For many observers, such a decision did not mesh well with a “Don’t Be Evil” company policy. Congressman Tom Lantos, referring to the China situation, bluntly asked Google executives, “You have nothing to be ashamed of?” Anne Broache wrote that,
“Rep. Tom Lantos dismissed the tech firms’ reasoning [for Chinese behavior] as “sickening,” and their actions as amounting to “nauseating collaboration with a regime of repression.” And that wasn’t the worst of the browbeating by far. Rep. Christopher Smith, chairman of the human rights subcommittee hosting the hearings, compared the tech quartet’s dealings in China to abetting the most noxious policies of Hitler’s Nazi Germany.”
Ouch.
Before condemning Google for their actions, though, I would first like to present the context of Google’s Chinese site launch and the specifics of this search service. This will require a brief analysis of internet regulation in China, a topic into which I would like to delve deeper in the future.
Google.cn evolved from necessity. The Chinese government controls access to the internet pipes entering the country, and consequently, is able to censor any material or information it deems unfit. And, with a reported 50,000 internet police, the country can censor with the best of them. [Some refer to all of this as The Great Firewall of China, an oddly humorous term for an arrangement limiting free speech.]
The problem with the Great Firewall was not that it altered the order of Google’s results so that the search engine became irrelevant. Rather, it slowed down the speed with which Google could return search queries to users, making the site virtually unusable. The company thus looked at China from a Utilitarian perspective. Launching a censored search engine was not ideal, but at least it gave Chinese searchers genuine [albeit, incomplete] access to the world’s best search engine.
Finally, I would like to bring up several other points.
- All Chinese users have access to both google.cn and google.com. Both sites offer Chinese language search, but only google.cn is hosted on a server located on Chinese soil. Therefore, the company only added options for Chinese users when it
launched google.cn. - Google users are notified when a website has been removed from search rankings on google.cn with a message at the bottom of the screen stating, “[l]ocal regulations prevent us from showing all the results.”
- Yahoo and Microsoft had yielded to Chinese regulators long before Google decided to filter its results [See this and this for more].
- Google has yet to offer Blogger and Gmail in China in order to avoid the hairy
situations Microsoft and Yahoo faced above. - Google minimally filters results in some other instances to abide by country-specific laws [i.e. Nazi related searches in Germany].
My thoughts. I believe that, from a business perspective, Google probably had no other alternative than to increase its presence in China; the market there is just too big and lucrative to ignore. Yet, if there was one company that possessed the power and the nerve and the willingness to buck censorship, this was it. Compromise may pay for Google in dollars and yuan, but opportunities to take the moral high ground against communism only come so often.
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