New York Times Editorial: Google and China

New York Times Editorial: Google and China
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: March 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/opinion/24wed2.html?th&emc=th


Google’s decision to stop censoring its search service in China on Monday was a principled and brave move, a belated acknowledgment that Internet companies cannot enable a government’s censorship without becoming a de facto accomplice to repression.

We hope that other American companies with operations in China, notably Microsoft and Yahoo, will consider emulating Google’s decision.

Yahoo said it supported Google. But soon after Google announced its plan to stop censoring its searches in China in January, Bill Gates of Microsoft told ABC News: “You’ve got to decide: Do you want to obey the laws of the countries you are in, or not? If not, you may not end up doing business there.” Microsoft’s Bing search engine is still censoring results in China.

We have no illusions that the Chinese Communist Party will suddenly decide to allow its citizens unfettered access to the Internet through Google’s Hong Kong service, where it was redirecting China-based searchers. Beijing is already reportedly disabling searches and blocking search results on Google’s site.

But that is much better than self-censorship, which put Google in the troubling business of stripping out results from searches about politically touchy subjects like China’s occupation of Tibet and the massacre on Tiananmen Square by the Chinese Army.

When Google took its search engine into China four years ago, it came under attack from human rights groups. Google countered that it was better for the Chinese to have a censored Google than no Google at all.

It took four years for Google to acknowledge the flaws in that reasoning, and it did so only after it discovered an attack on its servers by hackers in China that stole proprietary computer code as well as data about Gmail accounts of human rights activists.

Google can afford allowing google.cn to be taken off-line. Analysts say it accounts for 1 percent to 2 percent of Google’s revenue. Like other foreign Internet companies, Google has had trouble growing in China. Its YouTube service, like Facebook and Twitter, is blocked, and it has about only a third of China’s search market, around half the share of the local rival Baidu.

Still, the move to challenge the Chinese Communist Party may not come without a cost. China Mobile, the biggest cellular company in the country, was expected to cancel a deal to use Google’s search engine on its home page. China Unicom was thought to have canceled plans to create a telephone based on Google’s Android system. Other measures are likely to come.

Google’s departure may have more resonance outside China than within. We don’t know how many of China’s many millions of Internet users will be able to read about this public indictment of China’s use of censorship. But that is preferable to helping maintain the fiction that the Internet in China is the same sort of vehicle for open communication that it is most everywhere else.