Federal Judiciary

Google Stands Up to Beijing -- By: The Editors

In 2005, Google, the Internet giant, went into China. It also agreed to censor its search engine, in order to appease the Communist government. Google in China would be different from Google elsewhere. If you typed in ?democracy,? ?human rights,? or ?Tibet,? you could come up with nothing at all.

Google justified its deal by saying that the benefits that would flow from Google to the Chinese people outweighed the evil, or embarrassment, of censorship. That may have been a correct calculation, but the arrangement was distasteful. Google?s CEO, Eric Schmidt, said, ?I think it?s arrogant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning to operate and tell that country how to operate.? But there is a difference between a country and a dictatorial regime, to which Google was kowtowing. China is one thing, the Chinese police state another.

Many noted that Google?s slogan was ?Don?t be evil? -- and wondered whether the company would bear that in mind, while operating, and cooperating, in China.

In any case, Google has now had enough, apparently, and it has fired an amazing shot across the Chinese government?s bow. Last month, the Chinese government attacked Google?s ?corporate infrastructure,? as the company says. The government?s main purpose was to pry into the Gmail accounts of human-rights activists and their supporters. (Gmail is the e-mail service that Google provides.) Through its chief legal officer, David Drummond, Google said,

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.

That is something very much new under the sun.

Freedom House does a survey called ?Freedom on the Net: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media.? According to this survey, China is ?Not Free.? And American or Western companies have not seemed particularly bothered by this unfreedom. Yahoo!, notoriously, provided information to the dictatorship that led to the conviction of dissidents (not that Chinese courts have need for much evidence). In his 2004 book, Losing the New China, Ethan Gutmann calls a roll of dishonor: Cisco, Motorola, Microsoft#...#. All of these companies have kowtowed, and special shame belongs to Nortel, a Canadian firm, which presented an Internet surveillance mechanism specifically designed to catch practitioners of Falun Gong.

Chinese people are interested in Internet freedom, along with freedom at large. A student asked Barack Obama a simple question, during the president?s recent visit to China: ?Should we be able to use Twitter freely?? You might have thought that the president of the United States would answer quickly, ?Yes.? Instead, Obama gave a mushy, meandering answer, over the course of which he admitted, ?There are times where I wish information didn?t flow so freely,? but added that it was good for him to have to listen to his critics. It was not exactly Churchillian, or Jeffersonian, but at least he came down on the right side, eventually.

Unfortunately, there are Free World liberals who envy China?s dictatorial might. Consider the New York Times?s Thomas L. Friedman, three-time winner of the Pulitzer prize and a golf partner of President Obama. He recently wrote, ?One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.?

Presumably, that does not include Internet censorship.

And we have seen how hard it is to stand up to Beijing, for a company or a government. In the first weeks of the new administration, the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, made clear that human rights would be on the back burner at best. Speaking of the Chinese authorities, she said, ?We have to continue to press them. But our pressing on these issues can?t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate-change crisis, and the security crisis.?

Wouldn?t it be something if Google, most prominently, did the pressing? If Google has finally had enough, that is a remarkable development, and a nervy message to the PRC.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on January 13, 2010 (boomark / email).