Networking and the challenges of government censorship for Internet content access
Search engine leader Google has had a tenuous relationship with the Chinese government since launching Google.cn in 2006. Google faced criticism when it initially agreed to China’s censorship demands, but in their defense, they stated that not operating in China at all would be a greater loss to civil liberties than operating within government guidelines (BBC, 2010). China represents a growing digital consumer market. In 2008 when Google signed the Global Network Initiative for better privacy and free speech protections, China had close to 340 million people online versus 10 million in 1998 (BBC, 2010). This represented a $1 billion search market, which, at the time, saw Google with a 31 percent market share and Baidu.com with a 60 percent market share (BBC, 2010).
In January 2010, Google was targeted in “a sophisticated cyber attack thought to originate in China,” which was believed to be associated with email accounts for human rights activists and later foreign journalists (BBC, 2010). Reporters Without Borders spoke out against the cyber attacks noting that they may have been an attempt to extract human rights activist contact details, and constituted “a serious violation of their privacy, their professional work and their freedom to provide news and information” (BBC, 2010).
Microsoft was also implicated indirectly in the attacks as they admitted to a weakness in the Internet Explorer browser, and this prompted the governments of France and Germany to issue advisors to their citizens to switch browsers, namely to Firefox and Google Chrome (BBC, 2010).
Google’s tough stance against abiding by the Chinese government’s censorship demands received strong support from U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. Secretary Clinton called for a full investigation on the attacks, and also for Beijing to be transparent about the results. China sought to distance themselves from the cyberattacks to prevent the situation from having greater influence over political relations with the U.S. Government (BBC, 2010).
The core issue at the root of government-backed censorship was that “in an interconnected world, an attack on one nation’s networks can be an attack on all” (BBC, 2010). Additionally, attempting to separate political communications from commercial communications over the Internet was near impossible, and could find restrictive governments undermining their own commercial interests (BBC, 2010). Along with China, Secretary Clinton also cited Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Egypt as countries where the U.S. was supporting development of technology that would enable citizens to bypass censorship, and protect the “free flow of information” (BBC, 2010).
Google’s battle with Beijing is indicative of what is referred to as The Great Firewall of China, where searching for certain words or content may result in receiving a message that the page cannot be displayed; this has led to a technological arms race where hacktivists are developing software and processes to circumvent government censorship, and gain access to restricted content such as human rights causes or news from politically charged regions like Tibet (Wiseman, 2008). One such software is Freegate. Created by hactivist Bill Xia, Freegate is “a software program that finds holes in the firewall and takes Chinese Internet users to banned websites, undetected” (Wiseman, 2008). This software is also able to funnel banned email messages to recipients, and deliver real-time news, such as the snow delayed train schedule Beijing refused to admit publicly but that had many travellers stranded (Wiseman, 2008). Internet users are also implementing less sophisticated solutions like adding spaces and characters between words to foil censorship filters, or using code words that sound similar to banned words, but with slightly different intonation and thus different meaning (Wiseman, 2008).
But the Chinese government’s censorship process is highly sophisticated and circumvention techniques are eventually caught and added to the list of blocked terms (Wiseman, 2008). Some of these networking techniques include:
- Installing packet sniffers and special routers that inspect network traffic as it passes through choke-points, and then block a connection if the content is deemed subversive;
- Routing all traffic through a minimal number of computers making it possible to monitor all traffic coming into and leaving China;
- Blocking content display, or displaying warning messages to users who attempt to post banned content to forums and sites;
- Demanding that commercial websites comply with take down requests and censorship guidelines, or risk being shutdown within 30 days;
- Leveraging offline means to demand compliance including publishing propaganda, and banning out-of compliance journalists and news outlets from access to government officials for interviews (Wiseman, 2008).
Despite a Great Firewall that is seen as one of the most sophisticated censorship regimes in the world, China finds itself having to balance its desire to grow economically with maintaining tight control over what its citizens can access on the Internet (Wiseman, 2008). The Chinese government states that its censorship efforts are to prevent harmful content, such as pornography and terrorism, from being accesses within its borders (Wiseman, 2008).
However, citizens and activists alike would argue that it goes far beyond concerns of public safety. One bright spot is the social media scene in China, which, while still tightly controlled, has gone beyond microblogging to deliver deeper engagement with images and video (He, 2013). Former Google chief, Lee Kai-fu, believes that censorship can have unintended consequences such as lending more credibility to information by the mere fact it has been censored (He, 2013). The rapid fire pace of social media in general allows content to go viral long before it can be validated as fact.
At the height of the controversy around the cyber attacks, Google had threatened to shutdown its Google.cn operations altogether. Instead, the company stated publicly that it would no longer censor its content, and also moved its operations to Hong Kong in what is seen as an attempt to reach compromise with the Chinese government (The Week, 2010).
The relationship between Google and the Chinese government has remained tense, as noted in a recent move by Google to drop a warning message after the Chinese government had found ways to consistently circumvent their efforts (Halliday, 2013). In November 2012, Google services were blocked for 24 hours, and the government continues to block virtual private network use, which allows user to browse the Internet anonymously (Halliday, 2013). Google Drive joins a list of other social and SaaS services currently blocked by the Chinese government including YouTube and Twitter (Moskvitch, 2012).
But there is hope that cracks within The Great Firewall will continue to enable citizens to access content. Software products like Freegate, Ultrasurf and Tor enable users to tunnel through The Wall and avoid the restricted keyword and URL lists (Moskvitch, 2012). Cloned sites like Youku, which is a video sharing site much like YouTube, and Weibo for microblogging are in some cases more popular than their western counterparts (Moskvitch, 2012).
The popularity of Google’s Android operating system in China has created a new battleground and China worries about the control this may provide Google over not just content but also the means to access that content. China’s lack of a strong patent system and late entry into the operating system domain will make it challenging for them to deliver their own mobile OS to compete with Android (O’Dell, 2013). And so the battle between Google and China continues over network access to search content, and now to the mobile devices, powered by Android, that will provide citizens of China with greater access to the Internet.
Article References
BBC. (2010). Google ‘may pull out of China after Gmail cyber attack.’ Retrieved from http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/business/8455712.stm
BBC. (2013). Google turns off China censorship warning. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/technology-20932072
Custer, C. (2013). How the Great Firewall of China Works [INFOGRAPHIC]. Retrieved from http:// www.techinasia.com/great-firewall-china-worksinfographic/
The Economist. (2013). The Great Firewall: The art of concealment. Retrieved from http://www.economist. com/news/special-report/21574631-chinesescreening-online-material-abroad-becoming-evermore-sophisticated
Golijan, R. (2010). Google Refuses to Continue Censoring Results in China. Retrieved from http:// gizmodo.com/5446712/google-refuses-to-continuecensoring-results-in-china
Halliday, J. (2013). Google’s dropped anti-censorship warning marks quiet defeat in China. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/ jan/04/google-defeat-china-censorship-battle
He, L. (2013). After Censorship, Ex-Google China Chief Lee Kai-fu Talks About China’s Social Media Revolution. Retrieved from http://www.forbes. com/sites/laurahe/2013/03/11/after-censorship-exgoogle-china-chief-lee-kai-fu-talks-about-chinassocial-media-revolution/
Hoegberg, A. (2013). Doing business behind China’s ‘Great Firewall’. Retrieved from http://edition.cnn. com/2013/01/11/business/china-firewall-working
McDonald, M. (2012). Adding More Bricks to the Great Firewall of China. Retrieved from http://rendezvous. blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/adding-more-bricksto-the-great-firewall-of-china/
Moskvitch, K. (2012). Cracks in the wall: Will China’s Great Firewall backfire? Retrieved from http://www. bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17910953
O’Dell, J. (2013). China: Google’s too controlling. We should create our own damn smartphone OS. Retrieved from http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/05/ china-google-android-drama/
Protalinski, E. (2012). Chinese government blocks Google.com, Gmail, Google+, Maps, Docs, Analytics, Drive, more. Retrieved from http:// thenextweb.com/google/2012/11/09/chinesegovernment-blocks-google-com-gmail-googlemaps-docs-analytics-drive-more/
The Week. (2010). Google in China: A timeline. Retrieved from http://theweek.com/article/ index/200837/google-in-china-a-timeline
Wiseman, P. (2008). Cracking the ‘Great Firewall’ of China’s Web censorship. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ story?id=4707107&page=1#.UYnYiIIqGMU
