Google entrusts the future of the Internet to China after dumping "Do not Be Evil"

by
Suzanne Nossel

In May, Google quietly withdrew "Do not Evil" text from its code of conduct, removing a slogan associated with the company since 2000.

Amidst amazing revelations about how social media and internet platforms can allow political interference and new forms of stealth cyberwar, it has proven more difficult to avoid the evil in Silicon Valley.

In a world where Twitter's terrorist can be Facebook's freedom fighter, decisions on algorithmically elevated or deleted content can involve heartbreaking questions of interpretation, intent and context cultural.

But despite all the moral ambiguity and unexplored terrain of running an Internet platform controlling vast expanses of global discourse and achieving proportionate revenue, some dilemmas are simpler than others.

That's why Google's plans to significantly expand its currently minimal role in the Chinese market – thanks to the potential launch of a censored search engine named Dragonfly – have caused such an outcry.

Publicity

The plans were revealed by documents disclosed to the Intercept, who said the prototypes and negotiations with the Chinese government were well advanced, laying the foundation for the launch of the potential service from the beginning of 2019.

At the end of August, a group of organizations for the defense of freedom of expression and human rights issued a joint letter claiming that the launch of a Chinese research application would represent "an alarming capitulation of Google on human rights ".

Six US senators, led by Marco Rubio and Mark Warner, sent a letter to Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, asking for answers to a series of questions about the company's intentions.

This month, PEN America sent a detailed letter to Google executives outlining specific human rights issues and topics that, in accordance with Chinese censorship rules, would be repressed and misleading by any platform. information operating in the country.

Google employees are also angry: more than 1400 people have signed a letter to the management saying that the Chinese project "floated"[s] urgent moral and ethical issues "and requiring greater transparency before the plans are implemented.

By demonstrating that a company as powerful as Google was unable to resist the attractiveness of the Chinese market, despite the conditions of access, Beijing will continue its campaign to recast the governance of the country. global internet on its own terms.

The utopian notion of an Internet that unifies people across borders, promotes the free flow of information and allows truth and reason to triumph is already under attack on several fronts.

The trade-off, up to now, has been that countries insisting on Internet control have had to give up access to the most powerful and innovative online services for the benefit of local providers.

If Google is ready to play with China, governments in Russia, Turkey, Iran, Egypt and elsewhere will have no reason not to reinforce their own control of content and opinions.

At a time when even the US president is attacking Google and other platforms in a skewed and flawed manner, society must demonstrate a new willingness before the government blocks the rights of citizens to exploit digital technology. an empowerment tool.

Google is no stranger to the Chinese market or the moral dilemmas that it poses. Google started offering a Chinese version of its search engine in 2000. The blockage and periodic slowdowns caused by filtering through Great Firewall in China made the service unreliable and unreliable on the continent.

In 2006, Google launched a Google.cn service based in China, agreeing to block certain websites in exchange for a license to operate in the country.

The company promised to inform users of the continent when the results were retained and to avoid offering services that would require the hosting of confidential data on Chinese servers. At the same time, native Chinese Internet services such as Baidu and Tencent have begun to gain ground.

Chinese authorities felt they were using Western online services to monitor and hunt down dissidents.

In a notorious incident in 2007, it was revealed that Yahoo had returned private information on two journalists at the request of the Chinese authorities, resulting in ten-year prison terms and a public outcry at the show. an American company betraying its users. to an authoritarian regime.

The company sued the families of the two men, set up a US $ 17 million fund to support Chinese dissidents, and faced a congressional investigation in which Republican Tom Lantos sadly shocked. morally, you are pygmies. "

This is not just Yahoo. In 2008, human rights activist and Chinese activist Guo Quan threatened to sue Yahoo and Google for missing his name from China's search results. He wrote in an open letter: "To earn money, Google has become a servile dog from Beijing who wags his tail at the feet of Chinese communists." He has been serving a 10-year sentence since 2009.

In the same year, the Chinese government punished Google for allegedly failing to properly eliminate pornography, limiting its reach and favoring its main local competitor, Baidu.

The largest market in the world

In January 2010, Google issued a detailed statement stating that it would stop censoring Chinese search results and was ready to pull out of the market.

He announced that the service had been the target of attacks aimed at hacking Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights defenders and their supporters around the world.

The company's publication reflects Google's aspirations and trajectory in China, claiming that she had entered the country "convinced that the benefits of increased access to information for Chinese and a more open internet made up for our discomfort in agreeing to censor certain results. "

According to the statement, four years later, in the face of continued attacks and surveillance, "combined with attempts to limit freedom of expression on the Web in the past year, we are no longer willing to continue censor our results on Google. " .cn. We recognize that this could mean closing Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. "

After unsuccessful attempts to negotiate a way to stay in China by redirecting local traffic to the Google site in Hong Kong, the company actually left the market later in the year, retaining only a presence symbolic and a small staff.

It's not hard to understand why Google's business leaders have become reluctant about the Chinese market. According to a report published in September 2017 by the Boston Consulting Group, with more than 700 million users (almost as many as the next two largest markets – India and the United States – combined) and nearly 100 billion US dollars (140 billions of dollars), China has become the largest Internet market in the world by several measures, behind the only United States in terms of online spending.

The future seems almost limitless. With its large and mobile rural population, the growth rates of Internet use in China far outweigh all other markets, with Internet penetration rates still far behind those of other G20 countries.

Just behind the US giants of technology, Google, Amazon and Facebook, five of the world's top ten Internet companies are Chinese, including Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu.

China also has between 29% and 40% of the world's "unicorns", defined as privately owned start-ups valued at more than $ 1 billion.

For a leading global player to be excluded from an increasingly critical and dynamic market, this could pose long-term risks for Google's business. Given these parameters, it's not surprising that Google's management continues to explore ways to reintegrate the country.

For a long time, Western CEOs and politicians have argued that strengthening trade and cultural ties between China and the rest of the world would inevitably lead to Beijing's grip on political freedom and freedom of expression.

This theory dictated that even if, in the short term, companies like Google were forced to reject the values ​​of the company to take part in the market, this sacrifice could be justified with the time, their presence even in China favoring a gradual relaxation . constraints.

In 2005, after a visit to China, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that "in a country that is developing very rapidly, where 100 million people are now using the Internet and will be the second largest economy in the world. importance. in the world … there is an impetus for greater political freedom. "

Blair was completely wrong. Whatever the fleeting momentum that may have occurred in 2013, President Xi Jinping has begun a period of tightening, consolidating the repression of freedom of expression, freedom of the press, political dissent , protest rights and other civil liberties.

The premise of short-term trade-offs by Western societies to contribute to an inevitable long-term trend towards liberalization could have been plausible when Google and other countries entered China in the early 2000s. is not now.

As documented in a March report from PEN America, titled Forbidden flows: government controls on social media in ChinaThe burgeoning Chinese Internet sector has been isolated from outside influences. Beijing has created a set of rules and operational paradigms that are deeply rooted, rigorously enforced, almost universally respected and undisputed.

The Chinese are constantly implementing new technological methods of surveillance and monitoring, and adopting new laws that block channels of dissension and circumvention methods.

For media companies, there is no harm to the government dictatorship.

"The Chinese legal system is enlisting national social media companies to actively participate in the surveillance and censorship of their own users," the report added.

"Chinese companies have no choice but to operate according to government requirements … In the existing censorship framework, foreign social media companies simply can not operate in China without actively participating in government efforts to silence dissent by censorship. mass surveillance and the use of criminal charges. "

China's approach relies on a comprehensive philosophical conception of the Internet, based on the notion of cybersecurity, a vision that "rejects the universalism of the Internet in favor of Idea that every country has the right to shape and the internet borders ".

China is actively exporting this concept for adoption by other authoritarian countries and United Nations bodies. This paradigm is in direct opposition to the concept of an open Internet that digital rights advocates, human rights organizations, technology leaders and even the United Nations have long embraced.

Yet Western CEOs eager to enter the Chinese market have begun to moderate their public statements, tacitly eliminating the essential distinctions between an open and government-controlled Internet.

In this context, Google's leakage projects to China are troubling.

the Intercept have indicated that all blocked websites in China – including the BBC and Wikipedia – would not be available on Google, replaced by a harmless warning revealing only that "some results may have been removed due to legal requirements".

The so-called "sensitive requests" will be placed on a "blacklist", which means that people, subjects and photographs banned by the government will be removed from all appearance via Google.

Nobody will argue that, given the dominance of local players, the role of Google in the market may not be significant, the documents disclosed clearly show that the company is preparing to face the dominant search engine in China , Baidu.

Although Microsoft's Bing search engine has been operating in China for years without any criticism, it accounts for a smaller share of the Chinese market – only 1.27% – than Google itself, eight years after it closed on the continent. .

Google is not a key player and does not intend to be one in China.

Hide the truth

The ethical dilemmas raised by Google's plans are radical.

For Chinese people going through government in one way or another, the prospect of being wiped out of Google is a new, dehumanizing digital version of being declared stateless, persona non grata or outrageous the right to exist simply in the country where you live.

For ordinary users who benefit from Google's services, the government's right to access personal data – such as search logs – hosted on corporate servers would be absolute.

An appendix to the PEN America report documents the cases of 80 Chinese citizens who have been targeted, detained or prosecuted for online publications.

The list includes people such as writer Wu Yangwei, who was detained and searched after airing an online press freedom protest; women's rights activist Su Changlan, who has been convicted of "subversion" for publishing articles and commentary on Umbrella protests in Hong Kong; and blogger Duan Xiaowen, who has been imprisoned and tortured for blogging about government corruption.

Liu Xiaobo, winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, is another example of an online dissident. He died of liver cancer last year while he was serving an 11-year prison sentence for freedom and democracy.

The prospect that Google is helping to bring lawsuits against such brave defenders is disastrous.

While disclaimers and usage agreements may technically alert Google users, their searches (and possibly emails, texts, and documents depending on the scope of Google's services) are easily accessible to the government. free exploration and discovery that goes against the extreme caution that would be necessary to avoid triggering an official examination.

When users are arrested and prosecuted for disseminating dissenting ideas in personal communications on Google, the company can play a role as a mandated provider of evidence essential to a conviction.

Google's compliance with Chinese censorship guidelines will also have an inevitable impact on online discourse in the world's most populous country, obscuring the truth, reifying government-approved orthodoxies, denying history,

It is estimated that Chinese government bodies issue thousands of separate censorship directives every year, accusing all companies of complying with the threat of severe sanctions or closures.

Talks on Tiananmen Square protests, Taiwan independence and Tibetan rights are banned, and those who violate the restrictions are severely punished.

Beyond these three taboo topics, Google may deny its users vital information on health and safety threats when this information casts a negative light on the state, including vaccination, pollution and pollution. disease control.

Those who use Google to search for information about human rights violations – including the widespread and forced detention of hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region – will only find laundered accounts that will cover abusive government campaigns .

Articles or articles implicating the frequent use by China of forced confessions will be prohibited, which will help protect this brutal practice from any examination.

Other subjects that may be prohibited include the rights of other ethnic minorities; the ill-treatment and premature death of Chinese political prisoners; politically motivated accusations and trials of activists, human rights defenders and independent researchers; and extrajudicial executions of Chinese and foreign citizens throughout Asia.

While Google is positioning itself as a champion of the #MeToo movement, it will be necessary to censor this and the hashtags in China, to deny the victims of sexual assault and to abuse it in a desperately needed voice.

Google executives point out that all digital platforms must comply with local laws in the countries where they operate and this often involves imposing certain forms of censorship.

In Germany, denial of the Holocaust and other forms of hate speech are prohibited, for example, with strict penalties for platforms that neglect to remove the offending content.

Internet platforms are for-profit entities, not human rights organizations. Like all companies, they assess conflicting considerations and face circumstances in which declared corporate values ​​come up against commercial considerations.

But after several years of principled withdrawal from China to protest the country's intrusive and coercive policies, Google's choice to return now will lead to a huge victory for Beijing and its campaign to establish global sovereignty.

Indeed, for Chinese netizens soaked in music, celebrity content, recipes or videos, it is easy to forget, or even not to realize, that the system keeps some strictly forbidden contents.

Tens of millions of Chinese netizens are accustomed to a world where dissent, conflict and uncomfortable facts do not exist. At least, to this day, they recognize that the systems that they use are Chinese and are aware that beyond their borders, there are other versions of the Internet.

As Google becomes more and more available in China in the same way as existing local services, even the idea that a wider and more open Internet could be somewhere will disappear.

Demands external borders

The signal sent by the largest Internet company in the world, which accepts the Chinese dictates, once avoided, will ratify and legitimize the repressive rules of Beijing.

Moreover, even if Google officials were somewhat comfortable with the restrictions imposed as conditions for the company's initial return to China, the conditions of its presence will forever be subject to the whims of the Chinese government.

Google has described its decision to leave China eight years ago as "incredibly difficult". The market has since multiplied and has withstood the fury that accompanied it, a second retirement of this type would be even more painful.

These disincentives to exit will allow the Chinese government to have an almost unlimited leverage: and if it chose to censor all the critical coverage of Chinese policies or those of its allies? Or to ban all favorable descriptions of the United States?

After going through what he once described as "red lines", it may be impossible for Google to define new ones.

In addition, once it has re-established its influence on Google, it is unlikely that Beijing will limit its demands within its borders.

This year, China demanded that global airlines begin to register Taiwan in China, not only on the continent, but on all websites, price lists and promotions worldwide. Almost all carriers complied immediately.

With the growth of the film market in China, Hollywood studios are now integrating Chinese censors into the production of action films to ensure that the latest cuts – whose global release is expected – successfully pass the guardians of the country. The result is that the main blockbusters are written and filmed so as not to irritate Beijing.

The growing influence of Confucius institutes funded by the Chinese government in universities has resulted in increased censorship at academic and campus conferences.

Once Google's new Chinese company is operational, nothing will prevent Beijing from trying to determine how references to Taiwan will be addressed not only in China, but on the entire site. China may also demand that we look at how protests in Taiwan, Hong Kong or the continent are addressed or what happens when people seek dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo or subjects. such as human rights.

Although Google executives may believe that their company will never accept such requests outside China's borders, there is no guarantee.

If China gets the necessary influence for Google to present what Beijing sees as sensitive topics in the rest of the world, it will be a deadly blow to the international principles of freedom of expression and thought.

Faced with questionable employees at an internal meeting in mid-August, Google's Pichai maintained that the company's plans for China were far from finalized, insisting that many options remained on the table.

Google is not wrong to keep an eye on China and weigh all angles by analyzing whether the company can enter the market without doing more harm than good.

But the size, the visibility and the considerable influence of society make it impossible to minimize the harmful consequences that it could have if it refused not only the independent thinkers in China, but also the value system that founded an open internet and the rise of Google. himself

The effectiveness of Chinese authoritarianism – its effectiveness in stimulating growth and reducing poverty, its successful marriage with the oligarchy of the Communist Party, its ability to open the door to globalization while limiting unwelcome ideas – may cause some to question Beijing's crackdown is futile.

It is tempting to put aside the ideas of isolated, besieged Chinese dissidents in their desire to serve millions of ambitious and influential Chinese young people who have every interest in avoiding touching third parties.

In his speech to Google staff last month, Mr. Pichai said, "Coming back, I sincerely believe that we have a positive impact when we engage with the world, and I see no reason for it to be different in China. "

But in the rest of the world, Google has brought users powerful new tools for search and discovery information. In China, such tools already exist, operating under strict government constraints.

All that Google can offer China again would be the imprimatur of one of the most powerful brands in the world on an unprecedented system of censorship and Internet control – a system that strengthens, expands and provides a powerful counterbalance to the values and the principles allowed Google to grow and thrive in the first place.

Suzanne Nossel is Executive Director of the Pen American Center and former Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations of the US Department of State.