Censorship and the Search Engine

Officials from China and internet giant Google met this week to resume talks about Google’s continued operation in the country. This has prompted a flurry of debate and support from many who sycophantically laud Google as some sort of defender of human rights and bastion of free speech.

Let’s be clear about do not evil Google. When Google chose to commence operations in China, it did so with full knowledge of the level of state censorship that it would have to provide its online search engine services under. From the very beginning, terms such as human rights and genocide were banned and Google users in China could not search for information associated with the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Furthermore and as was reported earlier this year, Google can block entire websites that are deemed offensive to the Chinese Government and will remove web addresses (or specific pages within sites) that are known to carry so-called dangerous content. Google was originally happy with this level of self-censorship.

Then Google had a change of heart. It announced that it would cease operating in China due to cyber attacks (that were potentially state sponsored) aimed at collecting information on Chinese human rights activists. Though very serious allegations, such clandestine online activity is neither new nor surprising in China and Google was patently aware of the mine field it arrogantly chose to set up business in from day one. So perhaps the real reason that Google threatened to pull out of China is to do more with the fact that the internet giant is finding it difficult to compete with Baidu, a Chinese search engine that dominates the fast growing internet market which Google sought to originally exploit.

I would love to be wrong and to believe that Google has made an ethical rather than an economic decision – but I sincerely doubt that I am. Human Rights Watch previously praised the decision taken by Google and called on other companies to follow suit. It will be interesting to see what such an organisation, which is deserving of tremendous respect and trust, will do if the officials from China and Google manage to patch up their differences and continue to jointly enforce censorship in China.