Yesterday Google was the target of global protests in response to their built-to-order heavily censored search engine, Google.cn. Today was the US Congress’s turn to heavily scold Google, as well as Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cisco for the partnerships they have entered into with the Chinese government and the role they’ve played in spreading China’s internet censorship and surveillance. The Congressional Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights, and International Operations called representatives from the four dubious tech companies, as well as Reporters Without Borders, Radio Free Asia, and China Information Center, to testify on the role American internet companies are playing in China. Google posted the statement of their representative, Elliot Schrage (send him an email here) and I’ll analyze it below.

Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos, who’d previously spoken out strongly against Google’s China censorship, said:


Instead of using their power and creativity to bring openness and free speech to China, they have caved into Beijing’s outrageous, but predictable, demands simply for the sake of profits…These captains of industry should have been developing new technologies to bypass the sickening censorship of government and repugnant barriers to the Internet. Instead, they enthusiastically volunteered for the Chinese censorship brigade.

Lantos added, “Your abhorrent activities in China are a disgrace. I simply do not understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night.” Lantos’ strong words were met by equally critical remarks from his colleague across the aisle, Republican Chris Smith.

These are not victimless crimes…We need to stand with the oppressed, not the oppressors.

Smith is in the process of proposing legislation that would limit US companies from participating in censorship abroad.

The subcommittee’s chairman, Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, plans to introduce legislation by week’s end that would restrict an Internet company’s ability to censor or filter basic political or religious terms — even if that puts the company at odds with local laws in the countries where it now operates. Although some advocates have argued that the companies may actually be violating existing trade laws, most experts concede that does not appear to be the case.

Mr. Smith’s legislation, called the Global Online Freedom Act, however, would render much of what the Internet companies are currently doing in China illegal.

Among the act’s provisions is the establishment of an Office of Global Internet Freedom, which would establish standards for Internet companies operating abroad. In addition to prohibiting companies from filtering out certain political or religious terms, it would require them to disclose to users any sort of filtering they undertake.

Smith’s legislation could represent a watershed moment in stopping US companies from assisting China in their internet censorship. These companies’ morally reprehensible behavior should be illegal. It’s unfortunate that advocates of free access to information may have rely on governmental action for change, as Google, Yahoo, et al have made clear they’re unwilling to do the right thing on their own.

Google’s statement to Congress was delivered by Elliot Schrage, VP of Global Communications and Public Affairs. It is yet another installment of Google’s painfully oblivious self-defense of promoting censorship and buoying tyranny. One of the hallmarks of Schrage’s statement was the continual confusion of what matters to Google users inside of Tibet and China. Speaking on the previous slowness of Google’s Chinese language potrumpetedhrage repeatedly trumpted the desire to give users search results quickly as a justification for jumping in bed with the CCP.

Since 2000, Google has been offering a Chinese-language version of Google.com, designed to make Google just as easy, intuitive, and useful to Chinese-speaking users worldwide as it is for speakers of English. Within China, however, Google.com has proven to be both slow and unreliable. Indeed, Google’s users in China struggle with a service that is often unavailable. According to our measurements, Google.com appears to be unreachable around 10% of the time. Even when Chinese users can get to Google.com, the website is slow (sometimes painfully so, and nearly always slower than our local competitors), and sometimes produces results that, when clicked on, stall out the user’s browser. The net result is a bad user experience for those in China… At the same time, acting ethically is a core value for our company, and an integral part of our business culture. Our slowness and unreliability has meant that Google is failing in its mission to make the world’s information accessible and useful to Chinese Internet users.

People use the internet for many things and they want to find those things quickly, no matter what they are. This is not groundbreaking news. Of course people want to find the local weather, sports scores, and movie times quickly and it’s great when the internet can get us that information faster than a newspaper or phone call. But the mentality that what matters most to people in China and Tibet is the minutiae of daily internet use is absurd. People in China want to use the internet to find information that the government won’t let them have, information about freedom, democracy, human rights, and the history of the CCP’s rule, especially about Tiananmen Square Massacre. No one is risking arrest and protesting over slow weather updates. No one is crossing the Himalayas to find better access to soccer standings. Google has taken two entirely distinct issues — internet service quality and access to important information — and lumped them together. This is the height of intellectual dishonesty.

We noted, for example, that the vast majority of Internet searches in China are for local Chinese content, such as local news, local businesses, weather, games and entertainment, travel information, blogs, and so forth. Even for political discussions, Chinese users are much more interested in local Chinese Internet sites and sources than from abroad. Indeed, for Google web search, we estimate that fewer than 2% of all search queries in China would result in pages from which search results would be unavailable due to filtering.

Google refuses to drop it’s “politics aren’t important” line. The notion that 2% is an insignificant number, when there are only a few hundred filtered terms, is simply preposterous. Two percent represents hundreds of thousands of searches every week by people longing for unfettered access to the truth. Google is saying that these people don’t matter, a statement that they safely make from the halls of uncensored Washington and Mountain View California.

Google did go on to call for US government intervention to help companies avoid the difficult situation that Google has put itself in.

Moreover, the U.S. government should seek to bolster the global reach and impact of our Internet information industry by placing obstacles to its growth at the top of our trade agenda. At the risk of oversimplification, the U.S. should treat censorship as a barrier to trade, and raise that issue in appropriate fora.

This is an admirable position to hold, if Google truly welcomes government intervention with China. If Google is so concerned about getting the government to protect them from China’s demands for censorship it would have been great if they came to Congress before launch Google.cn last month. I’d like to see how willing Google is to abide by Smith’s legislation if it calls for withdrawing from their partnership in censorship with the Chinese government.

Schrage also proposed that internet companies set up voluntary industry standards on operating inside China and other regimes with internet censorship programs.

Google supports the idea of Internet industry action to define common principles to guide the practices of technology firms in countries that restrict access to information. Together with colleagues at other leading Internet companies, we are actively exploring the potential for guidelines that would apply for all countries in which Internet content is subjected to governmental restrictions. Such guidelines might encompass, for example, disclosure to users, protections for user data, and periodic reporting about governmental restrictions and the measures taken in response to them.

As before, I’d say this is a step in the right direction. Immediate, voluntary standards would allow Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to change their operating practices now without waiting for governmental intervention. But where was this demand before the US government grassroots organizations like SFT, EFF, and RSF expressed outrage at their practices?

EFF has put out an open letter to the Subcommittee with proposals for operating standards of US internet companies inside of regimes that censor the internet.

Both the U.S. government and American Internet corporations have a opportunity, and a duty, to defend human rights. While the best course of action of companies concerned about possible involvement in human rights violations and censorship is to avoid repressive regimes altogether, we understand that some companies will not choose that course. For those that do not, we believe that working together, either under a voluntary code of conduct or statutory or regulatory requirements, these companies can turn their involvement in oppressive systems from an inevitable human rights liability to a neutral or maybe even positive act of engagement…

With the stakes so high in countries like China, no Internet company should gather more information than they absolutely need about their customers and no Internet company should keep that information any longer than is absolutely necessary to provide the requested service.

EFF goes on to call for limits on data collection and retention, transparency of activities, increased encryption of searches and sites, and the cessation of providing technologies used to censor the internet. I think all of these would be great improvements over the current situation of US internet companies operations in China, whether done under government regulation or voluntary action.

The problem is that Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have had all the time in the world to do the right thing. Likewise, the government has known our companies were helping China and other regimes censor the truth from their people for years. It’s hard not to take a skeptical view on the likelihood of progress when nothing has changed so far. So while I am heartened by Smith and Lantos taking such a strong position in opposition to Google’s censorship and while I hope Google’s proposal for voluntary operating standards is sincere, I can’t forget the fact that Google can pull itself out of China and institute a set of moral principles to work under on their own at any time and yet they have not.

I look forward to seeing what Smith’s legislation actually proposes; I believe there’s a real potential for change here. I won’t hold my breathe while waiting for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco and others to sit down and come to a mutual agreement about how to operate ethically inside of China.

Cross posted at Tibet Will Be Free.

[UPDATE]: In response to an anonymous comment.
Anon - I hope you’re still around for this response.


First, it seems clear you haven’t read my other posts on Google and my opinions of China. I have addressed other justifications Google has offered in past posts. Schrage’s statement was long and this post wasn’t just about Google’s justifications. I’d like to do a fuller analysis and a point-by-point critique of their argument, but I frankly didn’t have time to. Looking at the entirety of their testimony, it’s clear that Google prioritized speed and consistency of service as the primary reason for launching google.cn. The argument that google.com’s Chinese language portal is still open, therefore people still have options is vacuous. If Google.com is a viable option for Chinese users, why launch google.cn? If Chinese users deserve unfettered access to information about human rights and democracy, why launch a site that explicitly blocks it. Google.cn doesn’t just block information - it redirects searches of “politically sensitive” terms to show only Chinese government propaganda. Searches on the Dalai Lama reveal sites about him as a splittist and counter-revolutionary; searches on the Falun Gong return sites about it as an evil cult.

Second, Google - and Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco - do have power over the Chinese government. They have the right to refuse to do business with them. Plenty of other internet companies refuse to do business in China (Icerocket & Clusty come to mind). Further, Google’s admirable suggestion of voluntary industry standards prove that these companies do in fact have the ability to set their terms of engagement.

Third, you once again prove that you have not read me before. Trying to diminish my post by calling it “pious” is absurd. I DO PERSONALLY boycott anything made in China. I’ve repeatedly raised that issue in discussion of the one-day Google boycott. I would love to see every free country boycott Chinese goods, but I live in the real world where activists have limited budgets and have to overcome forces like trillions of dollars of international trade. Give me millions of dollars and a fleet of diplomats and sure it’d make sense for me to call for a global boycott of Chinese products. But get real, that’s not the situation anyone is operating in and you’ve set a false standard for what constitutes legitimate action against a totalitarian government.

The bottom line is that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cisco have made deals to operate in China that only buoy China’s censorship apparatus. Other Western companies have made similar deals in other areas (BP, Bombardier, Holiday Inn, Hyatt, Goldman Sachs, etc) and I abhor those as well. But it is an unrealistic proposal to say the only valid objection to companies facilitating China’s human rights abuses is to stage an international boycott of trade with China. To ask that is to ask that no one ever object on moral grounds to how businesses deal with China and I refuse to accept that proposal.