Jayeless

Official Google Blog: A new approach to China

This is probably everywhere by now, but regardless, I’ll post it anyway: Google has announced that it will no longer be censoring internet search results in China.

According to Google, the reason for their decision is that a group of hackers within China breached Google’s security in an attempt to access the personal emails of Chinese human rights activists. Furthermore, the emails of human rights activists throughout China, the US and Europe have been accessed thanks to malware installed on their computers, seemingly from much the same source.

Google’s policy was always that it was better to offer a limited (censored) service to Chinese people than no service at all (which would be the case if Google was blocked). I can sympathise with this. But the Chinese regime’s fondness for “cyberwarfare”, using malware and hacking against its political opponents, seems to have caused Google to draw the line. What point is there in cooperating with an oppressive regime that isn’t even cooperating with you?

In Al Jazeera’s article on this subject, they quoted Danny O’Brien, an “internet rights” activist, saying:

“This changes the game because the question won’t be ‘How can we work in China?’ but ‘How can we create services that Chinese people can use, from outside of China?’”

Offering limited services may be better than offering none at all, but better still is offering a full and uncensored service to people (even if they have to jump through a few hoops to get there). If trying to cooperate with the Chinese government is too difficult and unsatisfactory to boot, it’s time to think of a better solution.

I would start with doing everything I could to promote anonymisers and proxies, like Tor and the Usejump browser. Spread them by USB if need be. The Chinese government can refine its Great Firewall all it likes, but it’d have difficulty blocking programs on USBs.

Wed, 13.01.2010, 6pm • 3 Comments • Tags: news, politics, rights, Internet, censorship, China