Google and other Western internet companies are competing in a ”race to the bottom” as they bow to Chinese censors in order to gain a slice of the world’s most promising market, critics said on Thursday.
The Silicon Valley-based online search engine caused uproar when it launched a new service in China on Wednesday after agreeing to censor websites and content banned by the nation’s propaganda chiefs.
”It’s taking the whole universe and cutting it down to the lowest common denominator of censorship and control,” Sharon Hom, the New York-based executive director of Human Rights in China, said. ”It’s a race to the bottom rather than trying to exercise corporate leadership.”
China is often accused of being among the world’s worst suppressors of free speech.
Reporters sans Frontières this month named China as one of 15 ”enemies of the internet” alongside the likes of Myanmar, Iran and Syria, and ranked it 159th on a list of 167 countries in its global press freedom index.
But with an online population of 111-million and growing, China is well on the way to becoming the world’s largest internet market, and major Western companies such as Google feel they can not afford to miss out.
”It’s about money, always,” said Rebecca Jeschke, of United States-based digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation. ”There is a tonne of money to be made in China and the rules are a little different when there is that much money to be made.”
Before Google, Microsoft was the latest Western tech firm to be put under the spotlight when it this month blocked a prominent Chinese internet blogger who wrote critically of a management purge at a popular daily newspaper.
And Yahoo! came under fire last year for turning over the e-mail records of journalist Shi Tao to authorities. Shi, who circulated a government order to suppress all media commemorations of the 15th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, was later jailed for 10 years.
Cisco Systems and other firms have also been accused of helping set up what has come to be known as the ”great firewall of China”, one of the world’s most advanced systems of censoring information on the internet.
US Verso Technologies admitted in November last year it had sold software to a major, but undisclosed, Chinese telecoms firm that would allow China to block popular free internet telephone services such as Skype.
Some critics caution a growing political backlash could result as the number of companies making money in Chinese cyberspace reaches a critical mass.
In the US, Republican congressman Chris Smith has already slammed Google’s decision and announced he will lead a February 16 hearing into procedures of US internet companies in China.
”It is astounding that Google, whose corporate philosophy is ‘Don’t be evil’, would enable evil by cooperating with China’s censorship policies just to make a buck,” said Smith, chairperson of a subcommittee on human rights. ”Many Chinese have suffered imprisonment and torture in the service of truth — and now Google is collaborating with their persecutors.”
Amnesty International said internet firms were short-sighted in caving in to China’s censors, given the industry’s claim that it promotes the right to freedom of information of all people, at all times, everywhere.
Their agreements with the Chinese authorities have entrenched internet censorship as the norm in China, the London-based group said.
”The internet heralded unfettered access to information in a borderless world,” Amnesty secretary general Irene Khan said in a statement. ”Instead, companies are helping governments build borders to prevent their citizens from accessing information.” — Sapa-AFP