After nearly a decade of exile, Google is planning its return to China – on the same censored terms that heralded its departure back in 2010. A Google employee concerned about the ethics of this new venture leaked documents to the The Intercept, which broke the news this week.
Codenamed Dragonfly, Google’s new service will comply with China’s censorship requirements across its search and autocomplete functions. Results will be filtered so that, for example, if you searched for ‘Tiananmen Square’ you won’t find anything about the 1989 massacre. Some websites, including the BBC and Wikipedia, will be removed from results altogether.
The employee behind the leak was one of a few hundred people who knew about the plans. “I’m against large companies and governments collaborating in the oppression of their people,” they said, outlining how severely the move could undermine the reputation of the company once known for the motto “don’t be evil”.
Complying with Beijing-sanctioned censorship won’t be easy for Google. The Chinese government’s online content restrictions change in line with what the Communist Party thinks could upset social harmony. Words are sometimes blocked temporarily. Earlier this year, “board a plane”, which in Chinese is homophonous with “ascend the throne”, was banned from the social media site Weibo after China changed its constitution to allow President Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely. Other seemingly innocuous terms such as “emigrate”, “disagree” and “Winnie the Pooh” (allegedly bearing a resemblance to Xi) were also temporarily blocked.
Under China’s new cybersecurity law, internet service providers must obey shifting government requirements and anticipate what might offend the Party. They don’t always get this right – Weibo recently prohibited homosexual content from its platforms but swiftly reversed the ban following public outcry and muted reaction from the government. For a foreign company, to tweak its content effectively is like a game of chess where the rules keep changing. The unnamed Chinese company that Google is obliged to partner with in the Dragonfly project will likely play a major role in navigating these murky censorship rules and expectations. Complicating things, however, are the efforts of ordinary users to fight back against the censorship machine.
The digital dance between those who want to speak freely and those trying to stop them is neverending. The hashtag #metoo is frequently blocked in China. The movement started at Beijing’s prestigious universities, traditionally a hotbed of political debate, with allegations against senior professors, but has since spread to an outpouring of experiences from many walks of life being shared on social media. To get round the censorship, #mitu, which translates as ‘rice bunny’, has sprung up.
When a Peking University student was placed under house arrest earlier this year for investigating sexual harassment, her written statement was swiftly blocked on WeChat, China’s ubiquitous messaging app. Supporters turned to the common technique of sending an image of the statement, rather than its text. The image was then also blocked. The solution? Send the image upside down. One supporter even went so far as to stamp the statement onto an Ethereum transaction on the blockchain.
Chinese netizens who want to search and share prohibited information are trying their best to beat the censors. The question is over whether Dragonfly can prevent them — and to what lengths it is ready to go to do so.
Internet companies operating in China are legally obliged to share user data with the government. As BuzzFeed’s Megha Rajagopalan has pointed out, in some parts of China it’s not just information that is blocked. Even the possession of material seen as subversive, such as Islamic imagery, can land the user in a re-education camp. Will Dragonfly hand over information of a person who, for example, searches for a mosque on its platform? How would Google defend aiding China’s mass harvesting of private online information, amid the backlash technology companies are facing in the West for mishandling user data? How would that square with Google’s “don’t be evil" rhetoric, or with Alphabet’s current official motto, “Do the right thing”?
And one might wonder whether Google’s morally hazardous move will pay off at all. Dragonfly will have to offer a better service than its main competitor Baidu, which currently has 76 per cent of the market share. The Chinese internet is a closed ecosystem, by law but also by habit. The Great Firewall blocks websites such as Facebook, Instagram and of course Google, but virtual private networks (VPNs) are a relatively reliable way of scaling it. Although the government has cracked down on the use of VPNs, they are still available to the determined, but only about three per cent of netizens use them.
This has shaped the internet behaviour of millions of Chinese users, who would have little incentive to make the switch to a new search engine that is as censored as the one they have been using for years. In a country where the current younger generation have comfortably lived their online lives without Google, the phrase “let me Dragonfly that” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
Maybe the best way to make sense of all this is through the prism of the power play between Western tech and the Chinese government. Earlier this year, Apple was criticised for moving Chinese users’ iCloud data – and the encryption keys – to servers owned by the state-run China Telecom. Apple also complied with Chinese government demands to remove VPNs from the Chinese version of the App Store. Facebook has long been desperate to break into China’s billion-strong market – given its recent troubles at home, the financial incentive to do things the Chinese way will become even stronger.
The reasons behind Silicon Valley’s courtship of China? As usual, fear and money. Trust in big tech has never been weaker. Although the privacy crusaders who spurn Google, Facebook and the rest in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal are yet to catch on, expanding into new markets will be key to these companies’ growth — and no online market is bigger than China’s.
As for the Chinese government, it doesn’t need Google – domestic tech firms already provide all of the services that the company offers. But China’s ambitions have spread beyond just maintaining the ‘internet sovereignty’ that is used to justify censorship at home. With the sprawling Belt and Road Initiative, which could more plainly be called China’s foreign policy, the Party is determined to spread its vision of Chinese influence further afield. By letting Google into the arena on these terms, it sends a clear message to the tech world about what the rules are if you want to compete.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
