Google Under the Gun

By Lev Grossman, Hannah Beech

When web surfers from the city of Shenzhen, in southern China, visit a government website, they are greeted by two adorable cartoon figures, a tiny policeman and policewoman with friendly smiles, no noses (for some reason) and huge melting blue anime eyes. These little rascals' names are Jingjing and Chacha (jingcha is Mandarin for police), and they are there to remind Web surfers to behave themselves because the Internet cops are always watching.

Westerners tend to think of the Web the way we think of the moon: it looks the same everywhere, and when you're on it you can pretty much do whatever you want. But seen from China, the Web is very different. Beijing employs a force of 30,000 Internet censors 24/7, blocking access to many sites expressing nonapproved opinions on hot-button issues like Taiwanese independence and the Falun Gong religious sect. When Western Web surfers search for images of "Tiananmen" on Google, they get row upon row of tanks, the indelible afterimage of the tragedy of 1989. Do the same search when you're in China, and you get a snapshot of U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez and his wife posing in Tiananmen Square on a p.r. trip.

The Web giant Google reminded everybody very publicly last week how differently things work in China. Google launched a Chinese version of itself, Google.cn, that is heavily censored to comply with Communist Party regulations. For a company with the unofficial motto "Don't be evil," a company that has picked up the fallen standard of Internet idealism, that was a bit of a shocker. Did the virtuous Google just sell out its honor?

The harder you look at it, the harder it gets to decide. First you have to figure out what exactly Google just did. Google already has a Chinese-language version of Google.com--it has had one since 2000. But the authorities weren't fond of it, so they blocked access to its cached pages, Google's stored copies of websites, which could be used to view otherwise censored material. Using its online filters--the so-called Great Firewall of China--the government also made Google run annoyingly slowly, and sometimes not at all. The new site, Google.cn, is physically based in China and runs speedily and reliably, but its contents are censored by Google to accord with government preferences. (A warning label informs the user of this arrangement.) So basically, China's Web surfers have a choice: they can use slow, relatively uncensored Google.com or speedy, sanitized Google.cn.

Certainly the decision caused some hair tearing at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. "It's never obvious what to do in these situations," Google co-founder Larry Page told TIME. "One of the principles we believe pretty strongly is that having really good access to information for people is a great way of improving the world." But in the end Google chose to dance with the dragon--presumably the cha-cha. "Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission," the company's official statement says. "Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world's population, however, does so far more severely."

Sounds like a simple enough trade-off. But once you start picking at the edges, you discover a very tangled Web. First, Google's choice may have a plausible ethical rationale. But it is now a publicly owned company, and the decision also stands to earn it truckloads of yuan. China has 111 million Internet users, a number that grew a plump 18% in 2005. Granted, so far few Chinese have credit cards, but when they do, Google's shareholders are going to be peeved if it doesn't host a chunk of the ads that will woo them. And the owners showed their ire last week, not over censorship, but over the crass fact that Google's profit increased a mere 82% in its last quarter. That's not enough for a $433 stock, which became a $381 stock in the days after the announcement. Google may foster a perception that it is beyond the muck of the marketplace, but Wall Street is rapidly getting wise to the less poetic realities of the situation.

Yet it really isn't just about the money. One of the pervasive myths of the information age is that the Internet is a kind of magic spray that when applied to totalitarian states causes democracy to spontaneously blossom forth. "Westerners saw the Internet as this garage-door opener that you could point at closed regimes and open them," says Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of the forthcoming book Who Controls the Internet?

The authorities in Beijing have a more realistic take on the power of the Net. They realize that most people aren't going to use it to rally for democracy; they're going to do what Americans do: gossip about celebrities, check the weather, play games and score porn. So the Internet police mostly leave that stuff alone. Wu says the state of the Chinese Internet is even more ominous than total control: "It feels almost normal, so people don't think about what it is they can't get." If anything, the Web has been a galvanizing force for Chinese nationalism. The anti-Japanese riots that broke out last year over a Japanese textbook that underplayed wartime atrocities in China were largely organized online--with government sanction.

And to Google's credit, there are companies that have made far worse bargains in China and haven't got half the public spanking for it. In December the Chinese government took offense at the contents of a blog hosted by Microsoft's MSN service. Microsoft promptly clamped it shut, noting that the company had to obey the law of the land. Earlier last year Beijing investigated a man who used Yahoo! for his e-mail. Yahoo! promptly handed over his computer's IP address. Yahoo! now has one less customer: the man got 10 years for leaking "state secrets."

Moreover, Google's censored version of itself is hardly foolproof. Information is like a toddler: it goes everywhere and gets into everything, and you can't stop it all the time. Chinese doctors were swapping damning e-mails about SARS long before the government would admit there was a problem. Just fooling around with spelling and capitalization can outfox China's online filters, and there's free software available that can give Jingjing and Chacha the slip; Google's free Web Accelerator Tool does that quite nicely.

By some estimates China has 4 million bloggers--are 30,000 Internet police really going to keep them under wraps? Sooner or later the government is going to lose the fight. Being evil just isn't as easy as it used to be, and whether or not Google's actions are ethical in principle, we should all get over the idea that the future of the People's Republic hangs on a bunch of search results.

Global corporations have always had to balance ethical, cultural and legal considerations with financial ones; asking them to define ethical foreign policy is like looking to professional athletes to develop steroid-test rules. As Page puts it, self-servingly but accurately, "It's pretty hard for companies to act as governments. To some extent that's a good thing for the U.S. State Department to be doing. I'm not sure that's our role."

For Google, getting a foothold in the Chinese market now may well be vital for its survival 20 years hence. So it's not surprising that it would trade that financial confidence for a little ethical dustup. The real risk is that some of that dust will stick to Google's snowy-white brand identity. Google trades on its image as a different kind of company. It became a little clearer last week that there can be only one kind of company: the kind that makes money.