Google In China

By Jerry Pournelle

February 27, 2006

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Google has famously said its main business principle is "Don't be evil." Google is the good guy in opposing the SBC/ AT&T grab. Google's role in the latest Chinese government attempts to repress the flow of information isn't quite so clear.

There are those who say that Google--and Microsoft, and Yahoo, and Cisco, and all the other U.S. companies that work at extending the Internet to China--are, by cooperating with Chinese government efforts to control how the Internet is used in China, being seduced by the Dark Side of the Force. In one unfortunate case, Yahoo handed over the IP address that let the authorities identify a journalist whose "crime" had been to transmit a copy of a public document about the Tiananmen Square riots. The journalist has recently been sentenced to 10 years in a Chinese pokey; and zeks in China don't have it a lot easier than they did in the Soviet gulag.

It's easy enough to be outraged about this, and we all are, but as Business Week Online points out, it's a little more complex than we see at first look). Among other things, not only did Yahoo have a legal obligation to hand over the information, but there was no indication of what was being investigated: it could have been a spammer, or a Chinese phishing site. The Chinese authorities don't generally tell why they want information they have a legal right to get.

That, at least, is a pretty straightforward case, and I am sure Yahoo regrets its part in it for reasons other than bad press.

Now what about crippling search engines? Making it difficult--the Chinese authorities hope impossible--to find essays on democracy and freedom? Let us say that the journalist above did manage to smuggle out information that tells more about the decision process during that fateful week in June of 1989: Is it evil to make it impossible to find that story? Assume it is. What should Google do? Wash its hands of China?

These are not trivial questions, and any course of action here has far-reaching consequences.

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