Jan 15, 2010 Article by Theodore Roe | 1 comment

Google Stands Up To China

The term Silent War has often been applied to submarine combat. One can easily imagine the endless cat and mouse games under the sea that took place during decades-long rivalry between the navies of the United States and the Soviet Union. It was a quiet, secret conflict away from the eyes of the public, utterly obfuscated by the deep ocean. Yet there is no doubt it happened. While the diplomats smiled insincerely at each other, submariners engaged in an underwater chess game.

When the Cold War finally thawed and the world’s political landscape took on a new shape, a different kind of Silent War began. This one is fought in a sea of ones and zeroes; its soundtrack is a legion of ball-bearing cooling fans. It is the war for the Internet.

Do not be fooled, though. There is as much at stake as there was in the conflict between the U.S. and Russia. Indeed, it is very much in the same vein that this new war takes place. The fight is between those of us that would have as much information free to the public as possible, and those who label vast tracts of knowledge as verboten to regular people.

Who are the main opponents in this war? The United States and China.

The Great Firewall, a jolly term for the vast machinery of information suppression the Chinese government imposes on its citizens, bans mountains of websites, including Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. The state-controlled search engine Baidu supplies Chinese citizens with information from government-run sources almost exclusively and hides most news items that represent ideas and opinions contrary to the Chinese government’s viewpoints.

In the United States, the country which pioneered pretty much the whole concept of the Internet and the technology behind it, there has been a long standing fight against censorship in any form. The Internet is a tool of terrifying scale, and we have embraced it utterly. The information revolution of the printing press is tinker toys compared to what can be accomplished by this massive, and seemingly unstoppable, engine of knowledge. And who is the champion of this freedom-loving impulse in the U.S.? The titanic search engine Google.

Or at least it has finally decided it should be that kind of leader again.

Many people (myself included) slammed Google for doing business with the Chinese government when it involved self-censoring Google.cn. But the Internet search champion may redeem itself yet.

Last week there was news that forces either directly tied to or earnestly aided by the Chinese government hacked their way into dozens of American companies in order to steal trade secrets and pillage private personal information. Google was the group that discovered the breach. They conducted a bit of counter-intelligence work and discovered that the server they were hacked from was in Taiwan, but the true culprit was in mainland China. They are also the ones that discovered the hacking involved many more targets than just them.

So what happens now? The diplomats smile insincerely at each other, and the hackers go back to work quietly poking holes into each other’s networks? Certainly that will be a part of it, but Google has decided to take a far more bold approach. It announced it would no longer self-censor its search results in China. Sergei Brin, one of the founders of Google and a former citizen of the Soviet Union, was against ever dealing with Chinese censorship, and he must be very happy with Google’s new attitude towards the fascist Chinese state.

Will Google lose money because of this? Probably. They have 35% of the search engine market in China right now, and there is every indication that the number would go up. But what is the real price of this business? Every day more and more Chinese Internet users are hopping onto VPNs and utilizing other ways to ‘Scale the Wall’ and obtain access the uncensored Internet. Obviously the Chinese people are sick of their government micromanaging their net lives. We, not only as Americans, but citizens of a free Internet, should be helping them throw off their shackles, not cheering on their feckless leaders.

The experiences the United States had with the Soviet Union should have taught us that encouraging freedom tends to result in the dissolution of oppressive regimes and backwards censorship tactics. I applaud Google it taking a step in the right direction. I hope it is an indication of the increasing unwillingness of American companies to do business with the likes of Communist China.