Google Censors China Search: A Dangerous Game - The Corporate Role
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The Corporate Role
Given the relation between Chinese censorship and America's national security, it is important for American companies to act responsibly. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission includes this idea in its report:
U.S. companies continue to play an active role in China’s Internet censorship, providing hardware, software, and content filtering services. While these interactions between U.S. corporations and China’s government may be legitimate commercial decisions, in sum they had the effect of helping to build and legitimize the government’s media censorship efforts.
As mentioned earlier, search engines have attempted to justify their actions. In Google's case, the company has said that failing to provide service to the Chinese population would be have been the greater of two evils:
Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world's population, however, does so far more severely. Whether our critics agree with our decision or not, due to the severe quality problems faced by users trying to access Google.com from within China, this is precisely the choice we believe we faced. By launching Google.cn and making a major ongoing investment in people and infrastructure within China, we intend to change that.
However, there is still the issue of Google “helping to build and legitimize” the Chinese government's censorship program. While Google does not directly address this issue in its official response to criticisms, it does offer something that comes close, a claim that increased access to the Internet will ultimately produce good results:
We are convinced that the Internet, and its continued development through the efforts of companies like Google, will effectively contribute to openness and prosperity in the world. Our continued engagement with China is the best (perhaps only) way for Google to help bring the tremendous benefits of universal information access to all our users there.
Bill Gates, no friend of Google, also holds a similar belief. Are these companies sincere in their beliefs, or is profit maximization more of a motivator in their dealings with the Chinese government? Unfortunately, the world may never know, but that does not make the threats involved in censorship any lighter. However, their belief is worth considering, since it has been noted that word of Chinese protests has spread across the nation through cell phones and computers. The Chinese government knows this, too, though, and it is working to confront the problem.
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