Some of the little known facts about Internet in China are:
1. You cannot access Twitter in China
2. You cannot access Facebook in China
3. You cannot access Youtube in China
4. You cannot access WordPress in China
5. You cannot access Blogger in China
Basically, you cannot access the latest happening spots of the internet in China where the meaning of social networking and freedom of speech is dictated by the communist government.
And now added to this list is Google Search with a slight twist.
All these days Google was filtering the search results provided to the chinese citizens – as dictated by the Communist government of China.
But after a sophisticated hacking attempt on Google’s servers from China (obviously on behalf of the Chinese Communist government – because nobody dares to do such a thing in China without the government approval), Google said enough is enough and has stopped filtering its search results in China. Good for Google and its motto ‘Do no Evil’. China wanted Google to be a communist search engine in China and Google has finally did the right thing by refusing to be one. Well, Google is not Baidu 
Now Chinese government itself has started filtering Google search results in China. Surprising that Chinese government has not blocked Google in China inspite of Google refusing to filter search results in China. Well what is an internet without Google isnt it? 
The search market share of Google in China (which is about 34%) may not be large, with Baidu (the Chinese language search engine) being the top search provider in China, but given China’s huge internet user population – 34% is not a small amount and all those vast number of users are going to miss Google if China blocks Google. And blocking Google means you are out of the most sophisticated internet search tool.
What Google has done today it should have done long back when the Communist Chinese government asked Google to censor its search results as specified by the Communists if Google wanted to have a base in China. Google had then reluctantly agreed to the Chinese demand since it wanted to grab a good share in the world’s largest Internet base.
But when the Chinese government started doing all ugly things like – monitoring Google users for anti-government activities – and finally hacked into the email accounts of human rights activists and pro-democracy or anti-communist activists, Google decided to break the tie.
Today Google is no longer filtering its search results in China, but the great chinese firewall is.
Yes, China has two great walls, one is the physical Great Wall of China built centuries ago to protect China from the invaders, and now the virtual Chinese firewall filtering all Internet traffic entering and leaving China to make only the government approved content available to the Chinese masses.
Now a slightly different question.
What is the most important difference between Internet and Cable Television?
In Cable television viewers have to see what the television channels show, they dont have a choice over the content and can only view those channels to which they have subscribed to.
In the Internet on the other hand, viewers are the controllers and websites are only content providers. The Internet user decides what he/she wants to see, even in videos we can decide when to stop, when to continue, from where to see etc.
In the television news channels, opinion of the channel is imposed on the viewers. In the world of Internet we can get news from a variety of sources and are not bound by the opinion of any one or two news providers.
Now go a step forward – unlike in television channels, in the Internet we can have our own opinions presented to the entire world in the form of blogs, our own websites, our comments etc.
In other words Internet is all about Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Expression and Democracy – the right to see all news, the right to learn history from variety of sources and the right to follow an ideology. And this exactly is what the Chinese communist government is scared of. A facebook or a twitter in China would cause pro-human rights activity and more importantly pro-democratic voices in China – to get unified and mobilized. A youtube would display all those videos which have documented the communist atrocities in China. This could result into an existential threat to the Chinese communist party and the communist government.
In China you dont have any other political party or political establishment. There are no elections in China like in a democratic world. You cannot have your own ideology except for the choices provided by the government. You have communist political parties in India ruling its states because the democracy in India allows for different ideologies or political views to co-exist. But you cannot have a pro-democratic party in China because communism doesnt allow other ideologies.
The recent cyber attacks which originated from China on Google’s servers and even on other popular mail providers like Yahoo were a Chinese government sponsored attack to hack into the email accounts of Chinese Human Rights Activisits. There was also news which said that even Google’s Intellectual Property was targeted in the attacks.
No technology company especially of the size of Google would tolerate this humiliation and unethical business practice. Here is what the Google’s official blog post had to say about the Chinese cyber attacks and the resulting Google’s decision to stop censoring search results in China,
We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
In fact in Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin’s own words, “The notion that somebody would try to turn Google’s tools into tools of political surveillance was something he found deeply offensive”. The use of Google by China to monitor and contain pro-human rights activists and pro-democracy activists and hacking Google servers as if it was a non-issue was what hit the last nail. All the IP addresses used to attack around 30 US companies including Google, Yahoo, Norton etc were tracked back to China to that of Chinese government or its proxies.
Finally the Google’s move has come as a relief to all pro-human rights activists outside China, especially in the United States who were critical of Google filtering its search results in China.
What Google has done is started redirecting its Chinese domain google.cn to its hong kong domain google.com.hk where the search results are uncensored. Yes Hong Kong even though a part of China today is like a country within a country where Chinese communist rules are rarely applied given the commercial importance of Hong Kong which China cannot afford to lose, not even at the cost of its communist ideology
So what the Chinese government is doing today is filtering its one domain while displaying results to rest of the country. In other words, google.com.hk shows uncensored results in Hong Kong, but its results are censored and filtered by the Chinese firewalls in the rest of China!
When asked, why are they filtering search results, the official Chinese response says that “Internet administration is not a special case in China as all countries regulate networks according to their own laws.”
Well, which other country on this planet is censoring facebook, twitter, youtube, wordpress etc?
Isnt there a difference between restricting illegal content and restricting people’s opinions? If China is serious about blocking illegal activities, why is it not doing anything serious about being the world’s largest piracy market and the country from where the largest number of malware come out in the world?
The Chinese government says that, “We’re uncompromisingly opposed to the politicization of commercial issues..”. Again, asking a commercial company like Google to filter search results so as to suite a particular political ideology, isn’t this politicization of a commercial entity??
Now how is this decision going to impact Google’s commercial profits. Well, China doesnt even account for 2% of Google’s world wide profits today! But it is a really huge market to ignore and Google has shown the courage to do so. Note that Microsoft is still filtering its Bing search results in China! Google also lost about $10 billion in shares ever since this irritant with China started in January this year. Also companies which have partnered with Google in China have sent a letter to Google informing how badly their businesses are going to be hurt because of Google’s decision to pull out of China.
So it definitely might not have been an easy task for Google CEO Eric Schmidt to pull out of China in the worst case, nor was it easy six years back when Google agreed to censor search results in China. It was a business decision then and the pulling out of China remains a business decision today. Google tried its best to see if it can operate in China even if it meant filtering out search results, but later found that it not only meant filtering out its results but also compromising with its user’s privacy, the security of Google systems and serving as a communist search engine – being used as a political tool to identify opponents of the communist party of China. In the own words of Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin, the highly sophisticated cyberattack on Google’s servers which targeted email accounts of Chinese activists was the “straw that broke the camel’s back”.
It will now be interesting to watch, what next? Now that Google has stopped filtering its search results in China, and the Chinese firewall has started filtering search results coming from Google’s Hong Kong domain, where does the Chinese government wants to go from here?
Are they going to take action against Google employees in China accusing them of working for a company which has violated Chinese laws? Are they going to shut down Google operations completely in China? Are other American companies going to follow Google? Are more cyber attacks expected from China on Google and co? Is it going to turn into a political war between US and China?
All in the name of “filtering illegal content”. Well all these days I thought porn was illegal content, but in China human rights activities, pro democratic movements, ideologies opposed to communism, are all illegal content. Wow!
As Thomas Sowell once said,
“Most people who read “The Communist Manifesto” probably have no idea that it was written by a couple of young men who had never worked a day in their lives, and who nevertheless spoke boldly in the name of “the workers”.”
