Google Kowtow Not Deep Enough For China? (UPDATES)

Google’s kowtow to China’s censors not deep enough?

Forbes newswire reports that two days ago Google’s new Google.cn portal was blocked in Shanghai and Beijing.

Google issued a statement after service was restored, saying “We have been working locally in China to resolve the issue in conjunction with the local internet service provider (ISP) where the problems occurred,” but not explaining further.

However, the AFX report carried by Forbes continues:

Sources close to the company said they thought it was an ISP issue not a technical issue…. preliminary tests from Shanghai indicated that the service may have been inaccessible due to blocking by the government. Tests on a Shanghai-based trace-route server, located at http://www.linkwan.com/vr2/, had earlier today indicated that the site was being blocked at the government-operated backbone server….The earlier analysis from the trace route had said IP packets were being lost past network 'CHINANET backbone.' The same message was displayed when the test was run on websites that are blocked by the government, such as the BBC's news website.

A little slap to Google, to demonstrate whose feet to kiss?

Both Time magazine and Newsweek feature pieces on Google this week, that Google shareholders who have profited richly to now may want to consider. A stock can’t go straight up forever, but especially when the company is undermining its own product and stirring trade-control legislation.

Time’s article points out:

[T]he owners showed their ire last week, not over censorship, but over the crass fact that Google's profit increased a mere 82% in its last quarter. That's not enough for a $433 stock, which became a $381 stock in the days after the announcement. Google may foster a perception that it is beyond the muck of the marketplace, but Wall Street is rapidly getting wise to the less poetic realities of the situation.

Yet it really isn't just about the money. One of the pervasive myths of the information age is that the Internet is a kind of magic spray that when applied to totalitarian states causes democracy to spontaneously blossom forth. "Westerners saw the Internet as this garage-door opener that you could point at closed regimes and open them," says Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of the forthcoming book Who Controls the Internet?

The authorities in Beijing have a more realistic take on the power of the Net. They realize that most people aren't going to use it to rally for democracy; they're going to do what Americans do: gossip about celebrities, check the weather, play games and score porn. So the Internet police mostly leave that stuff alone. Wu says the state of the Chinese Internet is even more ominous than total control: "It feels almost normal, so people don't think about what it is they can't get."…

Sooner or later the government is going to lose the fight. Being evil just isn't as easy as it used to be, and whether or not Google's actions are ethical in principle, we should all get over the idea that the future of the People's Republic hangs on a bunch of search results.

Global corporations have always had to balance ethical, cultural and legal considerations with financial ones; asking them to define ethical foreign policy is like looking to professional athletes to develop steroid-test rules. As Page [of Google] puts it, self-servingly but accurately, "It's pretty hard for companies to act as governments. To some extent that's a good thing for the U.S. State Department to be doing. I'm not sure that's our role."

For Google, getting a foothold in the Chinese market now may well be vital for its survival 20 years hence. So it's not surprising that it would trade that financial confidence for a little ethical dustup. The real risk is that some of that dust will stick to Google's snowy-white brand identity. Google trades on its image as a different kind of company. It became a little clearer last week that there can be only one kind of company: the kind that makes money.

Be Time’s liberal critical orientation toward big business as it may, the critique is still correct. It is the business of business to make money. However it is not the business of business to make American foreign policy, nor to undermine it by furthering the repression of democracy.

Newsweek’s technology columnist is more focused:

”The businesses know that building censorship into their search engines (and helping to stifle heroic dissidents) violates their principles”, says Newsweek's columnist, but feel the need to do so to gain entry to China’s market.

The column continues:

“Critics scoff at this stance: ‘There’s no evidence that Google and the others are providing any more information [to users] than Chinese companies,’ says Amy O’Meara of Amnesty International. In addition, says human-rights activists, when an American company agrees to filter political content at the request of the government, it lends an unearned sense of legitimacy to a morally repugnant act. ‘I think it’s all about profits,’ says Rep. Chris Smith (Republican of New Jersey). ‘They say it’s about openness, but they have an obligation not to promote dictatorships.' ”

Newsweek’s columnist concludes: “[T]he biggest country in the world wants to put shackles on the Internet. But it might spare us the spectacle of our brightest corporations’ trying to rationalize behavior that is, undeniably, shameful.”

Capitalism may be necessary to democracy, as Milton Friedman and others have said, in order to provide counterbalancing power to that of the state. But it is not sufficient without morality and unless it serves the morality of freedom, including of speech and the maturing thought that engenders.

We are witnessing the immature thought and actions of Muslim states inciting riots and violence against Denmark, that is furthered by the U.S. companies selling their Internet censoring technologies throughout the Middle East.

Please email Congressman Smith supporting his hearings on February 15 of the House International Relations Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations to devise reasonable legislation to restrict the flow of U.S. technology to repressive uses by states hostile to democracy.

P.S. Update: A columnist in England's left-leaning Guardian offers wry observation:

China protests loudly, and rightly so, when minor textile products are excluded from entry into the US. Yet when the fastest growing product of all - information - is excluded from China by its government there is hardly a squeak from the White House….

Oh, and one final bit of advice - which won't be taken - for the Chinese government: Why don't you lift the lid a bit on censorship before it blows off. Instead, market the impressive filtering technology you have developed to the west where a vast market awaits for the benevolent censorship of the web to protect children from abuse and all of us from spam.

UPDATE #2:
A reader sent me this report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), mandated by Congress to review the national security implications of trade and economic ties between the United States and China, before the House Human Rights Caucus meeting (that Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and Yahoo! didn’t deign to attend):

"China's Internet controls pose a security concern for the United States by facilitating the Chinese government's commanding role in the formation of public opinion about the United States and U.S. policies," she said. "These practices risk creating an environment prone to misunderstanding and miscalculation in the bilateral relationship, particularly during times of crisis."

As it’s said, read it all.