Google China Attack

Google Inc.'s threat to pull out of China because of hacking and censorship may further the Communist government's resolve to shape the Internet to its political advantage rather than accept the "unrestricted" Web advocated by President Barack Obama.

Google said yesterday it is willing to stop doing business in the world's most populous country unless China drops restrictions. The decision followed attacks aimed at Gmail messaging accounts of human rights activists and what the Mountain View, California-based company called "attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the Web."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on China's government to explain the attacks, which follow attempts last year to mandate the installation of filtering software and the blocking of social-networking sites including Facebook.com and Twitter.com. China is also encouraging its companies to develop hardware that will power the next version of the World Wide Web, said Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on Chinese Internet controls.

"China is building a model for how an authoritarian government can survive the Internet," said MacKinnon, a former fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society who is writing a book about the Internet and free speech. "The long-term strategy is to have an influence on the next generation of Internet standards that would be more compatible with censorship."

With its gross domestic product set to surpass that of Japan as soon as this year, China's stance on Internet screening sets up a fight between the world's two biggest economies.

Fostering Democracy

Obama told Shanghai students during his visit to China in November that the U.S. was committed to a free and open Internet to foster democracy, "encourage creativity," and promote prosperity. Google owns the world's most popular search engine and has a market value of more than $180 billion.

"I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet or unrestricted Internet access is a source of strength," Obama said Nov. 16. "If it had not been for the freedom and the openness that the Internet allows, Google wouldn't exist."

Clinton is scheduled to give a speech on Internet freedom on Jan. 21. Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt was among a group of technology executives who dined with Clinton at the State Department last week to discuss ways to promote democracy and development.

'Deeply Disturbed'

"I'm deeply disturbed that another wave of attacks is coming from China," Rep. Anna Eshoo, a senior Democratic member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement. "This raises serious national security concerns."

Wang Lijian, a Beijing-based spokesman for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said he couldn't comment as he was unaware of the Google situation. China's foreign ministry, the country's main government mouthpiece, declined to comment.

China's control of Internet access, dubbed the "Great Firewall of China," restricts access to Web sites including those advocating Tibetan independence or focused on news about the 1989 crackdown on students in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. News sites such as the U.S. government-funded Voice of America, and the Youtube.com video-sharing site also face restrictions.

Google, Beijing-based Baidu Inc. and the Chinese search engine for Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo! Inc. all self- censor search results.

'Unable to Display'

In July, for example, Chinese who accessed those sites were unable to read accounts of a graft probe of a company once headed by the son of Chinese President Hu Jintao. Instead, google.cn posted a notice in Chinese saying "the search results may involve material that may not be in accordance with relevant laws and regulations, unable to display."

Today, an iconic 1989 photo of a man standing in front of a column of tanks during the Tiananmen Square crackdown was available on Google's Chinese Web site. The news of the photo's availability was earlier reported by Agence France-Presse.

China's leaders have said that it is the government's role to control content on the Internet. In a December essay in the Communist Party's People's Daily, Li Changchun, a member of the ruling Politburo Standing Committee who oversees propaganda, said that "hostile forces" were using the Internet to infiltrate China with "decadent thought."

'Proactively Respond'

"We must proactively respond to rapid developments in Internet technology," Li said.

With 338 million Internet users at the end of last June, China has more people online than the entire population of the United States, according to figures from the government's China Internet Network Information Center.

Google set up google.cn in China in 2006, stating at the time that the advantages of giving Chinese greater access to the Internet outweighed the fact that the company had to censor some search results.

"When we went into China a few years ago, we made it pretty clear that having to self-censor our search results was very distasteful for us," Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said in a Bloomberg Television interview. "Knowing what we know now, having been attacked by organized forces that are politically motivated — we have dozens of Gmail users whose accounts are being accessed — we no longer feel in good conscience that we can censor our results."(bloomberg)