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After Refusing to Turn Records Over to U.S. Officials, Internet Giant Accepts Self-Censorship to Set Up in China: FIRM SAYS SOME INFORMATION IS BETTER THAN NONE AT ALL

Posted on: Wednesday, 25 January 2006, 12:00 CST

By Michael Bazeley, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

Jan. 25--Google on Tuesday launched operations in China, a decision executives have agonized over because it will require the Internet firm to subject itself to self-censorship to comply with Chinese law.

The Mountain View search giant is one of the last large U.S. Internet companies to set up shop inside China. The delay reflects months of internal wrangling at Google over how to balance business interests against the company's distaste at having to comply with China's restrictive speech policies.

For now, Google is making what one executive described as a "targeted entry," offering Internet search but not e-mail, blogging, video or messaging services. As of Tuesday, some Chinese Internet users were able to access the www.google.cn Web site.

They were not, however, able to search for information on the "three T's": Taiwan independence, Tibet independence and Tiananmen Square, which are all forbidden topics in China. And Google is not yet offering its e-mail service, called GMail.

Ironically, Google's agreement to censor itself and comply with Chinese government rules comes at the same time it's being lauded in the United States for refusing a Justice Department subpoena to turn over data about searches conducted on its site.

Google needs to compete in the quickly emerging and potentially vast Internet search market in China. That market is becoming increasingly competitive between U.S. and Chinese companies.

But until now, the only way Chinese users could access the company's services was through its U.S.-based Web sites. Those sites often were sluggish when viewed from China, Google executives said, and what Chinese users see on those sites was subject to filtering and censorship by government officials.

Inconsistent with mission

Putting Web servers in China should improve the availability of Google's services, company executives said.

"Google is mindful that governments around the world impose restrictions on access to information," Andrew McLaughlin, Google's senior policy counsel, said in a statement. "In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on Google.cn, in response to local law, regulation or policy.

"While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission," McLaughlin said, "providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission."

To offer its services from within China, Google had to register with the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry and agree to comply with information security rules.

Owing to the delicate nature of the move, Google briefed reporters about its decision only on background, and then released a carefully worded statement. Google executives Larry Page and Sergey Brin were at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, and were not expected to comment on the announcement.

Other U.S. Internet companies -- including Microsoft, eBay and Yahoo -- are already established in China. But Google's entrance has been highly anticipated because of the company's global influence and its stated "Don't Be Evil" motto.

"Google's dilemma with China is a near-textbook case study on the deep question of how much assistance, if any, companies chartered in free societies should render to regimes that censor political and cultural expression," said Jon Zittrain, an assistant professor of entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard Law School who has studied Chinese censorship.

The human rights group Reporters Without Borders immediately condemned the move. The group's longstanding position has been that U.S. companies should not do business in China as long as it's ruled by a repressive regime.

Just say no

"Google is following along the lines of other Internet giants and bending to the rules of Communist regimes and going against the original, democratic guidelines under which they were founded," said Tala Dowlatshahi, the New York representative for the reporters' group. "At some point, they should draw the line and say no."

Google's announcement surprised no one. The company has been telegraphing this move since last year, when it announced the planned opening of a research and development center, hired a top China expert from Microsoft and opened a sales office.

Unknown until now, though, was how Google would make its move.

For now, Google is limiting its China services to Web and image searching, local searching and news.

Google will voluntarily censor its own search results. The company has compiled information on the types of Web sites and phrases China finds offensive, based on information from third parties and by observing the behavior of China's Internet filtering mechanisms.

"We intend to disclose to users when information has been removed from our search results in response to local laws and regulations," McLaughlin said in the statement.

The Yahoo lesson

Google makes similar concessions in other countries. In Germany, for example, a Google search for a specific Web site that allegedly contains Nazi content returns a page that says that, for legal reasons, the Web site is not available.

Google's decision not to place any e-mail servers in China is a calculated move intended to shield it from the type of trouble that befell Yahoo last year. Human rights activists blamed Yahoo for the jailing of a Chinese journalist after the company identified him as the owner of a Yahoo Mail account allegedly used to relay the contents of a secret government order.

Yahoo said at the time that it was required to operate under local laws and had no choice but to cooperate with police.

Google also intends to store some records of its Web server activity outside of China so that authorities cannot access them.

"They're trying to straddle, and it always seems like a good compromise," said Michael Lord, an international business professor at Wake Forest University. "But it can sometimes not work very well in practice. By limiting what services they offer and what they have on the ground in China, it's difficult to see how they won't be limited by that."

Google's late entrance into the Chinese market has allowed competitors such as Baidu and Yahoo China -- now owned by e-commerce company Alibaba -- to secure strong footholds while Google's market share has dropped.

Baidu, in which Google owns a small stake, is the Internet search leader in China with as much as 30 percent of the market, said Dick Wei, an analyst for JPMorgan Technology Research in Hong Kong.

Google and Yahoo each have about 20 percent, he said.

Wei said Baidu benefits by being perceived as a local company, while Google is seen as a foreign company. Baidu is more popular with teenagers, while Google is favored by university students and higher-income users, he said.

Contact Michael Bazeley at mbazeley@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5642, and read his blog at www.siliconbeat.com.

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Copyright (c) 2006, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

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Source: San Jose Mercury News

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