20100121 Why Google should let more air in

Why Google should let more air in
　

By Chang Ruay-shiung 張瑞雄
Thursday, Jan 21, 2010, Page 8

Google, the world’s biggest search engine, recently revealed it is considering shutting down its Web site in China and ceasing all business operations there. It cited attacks from Chinese hackers and overbearing official censorship and interference as reasons.

Google started operating in China in 2006 and has always complied with the Chinese government’s demands to censor certain material. It has, for example, removed the keywords “Tiananmen Square,” “Taiwanese Independence” and “Tibetan Independence” from its search engine.

Google has its own Ten Commandments. The sixth one reads “You can make money without doing evil.” Theoretically, I suppose that’s true, but this isn’t a tenet Google has been following in China.

The company has said it has already stopped cooperating with the Chinese government, refusing to filter search keywords banned by the Chinese authorities.

I did a test. Sure enough, I was able to do a search for “Tiananmen tanks,” albeit getting only 34,200 results. There was a message on the bottom of the page saying something to the effect that they couldn’t display some of the search results due to local laws and policy.

When I tried the same search on Taiwan’s Google site, it came up with 369,000 results. Something, it appears, is still being filtered.

There is a Chinese saying that goes, “If you have money, you can make the devil push the millstone for you.” In other words, money talks. Western governments and private companies are quite willing to turn a blind eye when it comes to how China operates the Internet. They want China’s money and a foothold in the market. They are not standing up to China and are even silently complicit in what is going on.

The fact that Google has gone public with this suggests that either the Chinese government or hackers went too far this time, breaking into the Gmail system to poach the account details of dissidents. If Google had let things carry on as they were, they would have seen their global e-mail market share plummet.

It will be interesting to see whether other major Internet players such as Yahoo, Apple or Microsoft will follow suit, or how the US and the EU will react. Wasn’t everyone up in arms over the “Green Dam” Internet filtering software? China had wanted to force PC manufacturers to bundle the program with all domestically sold computers.

It doesn’t matter either way. There’s nothing new about China clamping down on Internet activity, and it’s unlikely to give an inch. At best, Beijing gives everyone involved a chance to pay lip service to an ideal before they back down … and then get back to the business of making money.

There is a huge number of Internet users in China, so it doesn’t really matter in practical terms whether Google stays or goes. I say this because there are plenty of pieces of software on the Internet capable of getting around Chinese censorship.

Google’s withdrawal, however, will have enormous symbolic importance. It would mean Internet freedom in China is a lost cause. That is what is making Internet users there despondent, and what so many other people are finding difficult to take.

Transparency of information is a very important aspect of democratic governance. It is only possible to keep power in check when a government and its civil service are unable to keep information concealed.

The development of the Internet has been important in this regard: Its biggest contribution has been facilitating the rapid dissemination of information, making it much more difficult for a government to keep the public uninformed. Cloak and dagger machinations now become more complicated. We can understand, then, why governments the world over are keen to control online content.

These same governments, however, need to understand that secrecy and control of access breed curiosity. Once accessed, information is easily spread, whether via peer-to-peer transfers, ftp uploads or e-mail attachments. The more you restrict access to information, the more people will want to look at it, and in the end you can be sure they will. Secrecy is a waste of time and effort and, worse still, it earns the government nothing but notoriety as a police state.

The Internet is like a window that, once opened, gives you a global panorama. At the same time, it leaves you vulnerable to all kinds of unwanted visitors that can jump, fly or crawl in. Google should not close that window.

Rather, Google should try to open the window wider, and perhaps open a few others at the same time, thus letting more air — information — in.

Chang Ruay-shiung is vice president of National Dong Hwa University.