By Ryan Stone
Why the world’s most utilized search engine is threatening to stop service to the world’s most populous country
China is the most highly populated country in the world. No country in the world can match their record 1.3 billion people. In terms of sheer numbers, there are roughly four Chinese citizens for every one American.
It seems like China is the biggest fish in the pond, but there is one place that not only matches it in terms of population, but trumps it with a solid 1.7 billion citizens. And, unlike China’s openly strict government, this place consists of an ungoverned body operating independently across multiple nations. This wondrous place has its own, unique dialects and a yearly GDP that is so large, it could be used to purchase entire nations for itself. This mystical land is a frontier state that manages to keep its finger on the pulse of world opinion through high technology and the use of near instantaneous communication. And anyone that’s anyone has dual citizenship in this new, advanced, and ever-changing land. Everyone’s familiar with it, and everyone knows what I am talking about. It’s the internet.
While the internet is not a nation in itself, it does consist of powerful, specific entities like Facebook for social networking, Ebay for commerce, and Google for that ever-so-valuable commodity: information. Information is exactly what was at stake this past December when a series of simultaneous cyber attacks hit Google’s corporate servers in China as well as violating a number of corporate mainframes and other non-related entities. And, even though no one is saying for certain, it appears that the Chinese government orchestrated the attacks in order to get information on human rights activists operating within their country.
That’s why, on January 12, after having investigated the recent internet attacks, Google firmed up their servers and reiterated their own policies on freedom of information and user security through an official statement on their blog. They also announced that China must either stop censoring Google in its country or lose the prominent search engine altogether. In a nutshell, Google gave China an ultimatum.
This throws China’s entire history of human rights, or lack thereof, into the spotlight. From its Great Leap Forward that resulted in millions of deaths to its modern-day treatment of its Tibetan minority (one only has to pull up YouTube to find videos of Chinese soldiers shooting down Tibetans like cattle), China has a lot that it would like to censor. Like many other nations, China wants to pretend that its atrocities never took place. Unlike other nations, the Chinese government openly takes measures to limit and block information so that information that is undesirable to them will simply go away.
Google has announced that they will begin talks with the Chinese government in order to resolve this issue, but it is not likely that China will allow an unregulated search engine into its highly policed information superhighway, meaning that, should the talks fail, search engines like Baidu will step in to fill the gap, as they allow for the kind of censorship that the Chinese government demands. It also means significantly less ad space for US and world marketing agencies on the Chinese internet, which means that more people than just Google stand to lose money if they makes good on their promise.
It’s not a surprise that the Chinese government may be prying into the personal affairs of reformers and revolutionaries within their own borders. Like any other world superstate, the People’s Republic reserves the right to do a little spying in the name of security and stability. The problem is that “security” and “stability” are the keystones of most high-traffic, important online enterprises like, say, Google’s search engine. In order to operate at peak efficiency while making users feel safe and secure, the internet, and Google, must actually be secure. Otherwise, no one would want to go online. Private information is private because it is not up for grabs. Public information, on the other hand, must be unhindered and uncensored for the internet to exist.
China disagrees.