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Google’s Stand on Uncensored Search: Irrelevant to China’s Internet Experience

I’ve been living in China for two years, but before I’d even seen the news, I noticed something had changed. My familiar Google.com homepage had been transformed into Google.com.hk–a web page, despite its distinctly Asian extraction, bears a strikingly resemblance to its American older brother. Having thought I’d made some mistake, I clicked my browser’s ‘Home’ button a second time and in a moment found myself back on Google’s Hong Kong-based search platform. Getting a bit annoyed, I deleted .hk from the URL and attempted to twist my browser’s stubborn arm into taking me where I wanted to go; “Why do you care that I live in Shanghai? I’m American! Take me home!” A moment later, Google.com.hk smiled back at me again.

Momentarily giving up, I manually navigated to Google Finance where the familiar-looking U.S.-based version of Google’s financial information service greeted me with the headline: “Will Google’s China Move Set a New Tone?”:

…..Google said Monday that it’s decided to re-direct traffic away from its google.cn search engine to Hong Kong-based google.com.hk, where Chinese speakers may access unfiltered search results. It remains to be seen how long Internet users in mainland China will retain access to google.com.hk. The site’s servers are based in Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China……

So now Google is doing me a favor by providing me “uncensored” search results via their Hong Kong based search platform? Pardon my confusion, but does that mean that my three years of search results using Google.com in China, rather than the local China-based Google.cn, was had been filtered the entire time? For now, I’m going to assume that if Google’s Hong Kong platform will provide uncensored search results to Mainland Chinese netizens then the U.S. platform has provided the same in China all along. The only difference now is that Google is automatically forwarding Mainland Chinese traffic attempting to access Google.com or Google.cn to its homepage to its Hong Kong platform. Until today, anyone looking for unfiltered search results could have simply used Google.com or any of Google’s dozens of regional platforms except Google.cn. The only benefit of Google.cn was that it provided a Chinese language version of the service, which was also always accessible via Google.com.hk.

My Google experience from within Mainland China, upset today by the impasse in tenuous negotiations between Google and Chinese authorities, is almost interesting as a new episode in the ongoing feud for freedom of information and an uncensored internet in China. Besides, I’m sure Google’s execs are proud of themselves for following their own mantra of “Don’t be evil” and taking what appears to be a stand on an uncensored internet experience in China.

My only qualm with all of this fussy posturing, that’s now even gotten the Obama administration officially “Disappointed” with Google and China’s failure to agree to disagree, is that it has absolutely nothing to do with the actual internet experience in Mainland China! Just because Google now automatically helps any would-be Google.com or Google.cn users along by forwarding us to their Hong Kong site for the glorious experience of “uncensored search results,” that doesn’t mean that these Mainland Chinese netizens can actually few any of the content on those pages! What benefit is my unfiltered search result when I click on it and the Great Firewall of China just blocks me from looking at it anyway?

There are several more reasons why all of this fuss over uncensored search results is irrelevant:

1. Censorship isn’t News: Anyone in China scouring the internet for politically sensitive content that might have been snuffed out by Google.cn’s filters already has no illusions about how manipulative, hypocritical, and controlling China’s internet authorities are–not to mention China’s entire government. In other words, they aren’t anywhere near getting duped into believing China’s official “Harmonious Society” tag line just because several items are missing from their Google search.
2. Circumvention Options Already Exist: Anyone in China who is genuinely serious about uncovered all of their missing content and actually being able to access it once they find it on their search engine of choice has options. For anywhere from USD $8-15 per month, VPN (virtual private network) software is available for subscription, which instantly unblocks all search results and real content in China.
3. There are Already Pockets of Free Speech on the Chinese Web: I don’t think Google.com or Google.cn were ever confused as a platform for political change in China. While I do applaud Google’s ethos of free information for everyone, people in China have many other places to go if they actually want to exchange politically sensitive ideas. Just take a look at Kaixin001.com! Here is an unblocked, easily accessible website on which hundreds or thousands or articles, videos, and photos are exchanged daily across China. Some articles are amusing distractions or mindless celebrity gossip, but many others are full of highly “controversial” content that blisteringly excoriates China’s government policies and the gaping holes in the face of its “Harmonious Society.”
4. Google.cn Wasn’t an Effective Block: To Google: For all of those politically active Chinese-only speakers whom you thought desperately need your Google.cn service in order to exchange information freely, don’t worry, there are plenty of other channels that were always much more popular anyway. Does Google really believe that Chinese people with the motivation to seek out a free version of the internet and access uncensored ideas will be deterred because Google.cn had some missing results to content that they wouldn’t have been able to view anyway?

I don’t want to step on Google for making a modest step in the right direction for a free internet in China. After all, I haven’t been able to access YouTube or Facebook for over a year within China and few would enjoy having those invaluable procrastinating tools back more than me! That said, let’s not get too excited about Google’s so-called hardliner stance on an uncensored internet. Moreover, we should not get confused and forget that China’s grip on local internet access has never been tighter than it is today. Until the conflict between the government’s need for continued economic development, in order to keep the masses spending money and buying real estate, meets an impasse with the need for more relaxed information policies, we should not expect any meaningful improvement in China’s internet freedom.

Image: zdnet