To get into the Chinese market, companies like Google have given up values that are at the core of Western democracy, writes Karlin Lillington
Information superhighway the internet may be, but if you are Chinese, some of the approach roads are barricaded, thanks to Google and other Western search engine companies.
Microsoft's MSN, Yahoo, and now search colossus Google have all proven themselves more than happy to comply with Chinese government internet censorship directives.Type in Taiwan or Falun Gong on the new Google China site that debuted Wednesday - www.google.cn- and the returned sites are those that offer a vetted Chinese government slant. Sites the government has deemed unacceptableare not allowed to be listed.
In a carefully worded statement Google said:"In deciding how best to approach the Chinese or any market, we must balance our commitments to satisfy the interest of users, expand access to information, and respond to local conditions."
In other words, they are hinting that they aren't really doing what they are doing. By expanding access to information, they mean us to understand that they are quietly going to open doors, even if just the unlocked ones. Yahoo and MSN suggested much the same when they too accepted censorship - that they will offer new vistas to the Chinese through the huge amount of information they are allowed to return during searches. This in turn will drive further openness.
Perhaps so, but that doesn't change the fact that these stalwarts of that most open and fluid of information and research sources, the internet, were willing to trade values that many would consider to be at the very core of Western democracy for access to a new market. Google is one of the internet's biggest corporate success stories. The company, which has a European base in Dublin, was valued this week at $129 billion (€105 billion). It began as a free search engine, but the accuracy and speed of the site quickly gave it millions of users and it became a profitable, targeted advertising service, although search remains its core offering and identity.
International press freedom group Reporters Without Borders slammed the company and its competitors yesterday. "US firms are now bending to the same censorship rules as their Chinese competitors but they continue to justify themselves by saying their presence has a long-term benefit," it said. "Yet the internet in China is becoming more and more isolated from the outside world and freedom of expression there is shrinking."
But think of the rich pickings. China has the largest population in the world, the globe's fastest growing middle class, an increasingly technology-literate citizenry, and a booming economy. About a sixth of the population uses the internet at home, there is a strong internet café culture in large cities, and the number of broadband users is expected to grow from about 10 million in 2003 to close to 34 million in 2008.
China is simply too promising a market for an aggressive company like Google to sit outside and let its competitors devour its slice of the pie. A publicly traded company has a responsibility to its shareholders to enter new markets and achieve the highest corporate returns possible, its defenders say. Well, yes, but one can use a similar defence to justify any corporate activity, from marketing nuclear arms to exploiting child labour.
What trade-off is a company willing to make to gain access to a market? For Yahoo, handing over data from one of its Chinese e-mail accounts last year - which ended in the imprisonment of a Chinese journalist - seems to have been a reasonable swap.
Yahoo said it had to comply with local government laws, but has tended to stoutly defend the privacy of e-mail account users in the rest of the world. Google's own Chinese service launched yesterday without the e-mail and free weblogging (online personal journal) services it offers in other countries, presumably to avoid being caught in such an awkward situation itself.
The compromise of allowing formal censorship of its own service is risible from a company with the informal corporate motto "Don't be evil". "Evil" seems to have different definitions depending which market Google is in. In the US, Google was deservedly praised this week for refusing to hand over data to the US government on the searches performed by a million random Americans (an attempt to profile potential criminals and terrorists which is part of George Bush's heavy-handed domestic "War on Terrorism").
Reporters Without Frontiers highlighted this hypocrisy: "The firm defends the rights of US internet users before the US government but fails to defend its Chinese users against theirs. freedom of expression isn't a minor principle that can be pushed aside when dealing with a dictatorship."
Strong words, but sadly, rather hollow. For surely, entering a market at such a cost indicates freedom of expression - when it means something more tangible than famously allowing your employees to decorate their office cubicles in any way they see fit, or wear what they want - can be quite easily pushed aside.