Rumors that Google may pull out of China has thrown the state of the Chinese Internet into sharp focus. It says much about the disconnect between the idealism of the Internet pioneers and the reality of how the Internet is utilized in undemocratic states.

During the 1990s, we were told that the Internet was going to single-handedly topple totalitarianism throughout the globe. Regimes would no longer be able to control the free global flow of information to repressed citizens, and knowledge would be power enough to squeeze the dictators out. Everything the optimists said about the Internet is true: unfettered access does have the power to liberalize less than undemocratic public spheres. But it's getting to that free and unfettered version of the Internet that's the problem these days. And the authoritarians -- most notably China and Iran, but others too, like Vietnam -- have been amazingly adept at filtering out what they don't want people to hear. Normally we don't think of business interests in China overlapping with human rights, but in the case of American technology companies, the two camps are, and will continue to be, more closely aligned than we might think. (Read more after the jump)

Google's China operation has been grabbing global headlines since last Tuesday, when it announced that it would plan to stop censoring Google.cn search results or pull out of China after discovering a significant attack on it's technology infrastructure.  Later Google clarified that it was interested in staying in China, but would plan to reduce censorship of its Chinese search results.  Official Chinese media has dismissed Google's human rights concerns as ridiculous, stating "Whatever the real cause for Google's possible move, this case is purely business in nature and it should have nothing to do with political ideology" and adding that it was "inappropriate to play up the issue, or turn it into a political one."  

But Google's business model is particularly dependent upon a political ideology - their own, very public, vision of the Open Internet, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to yesterday when she proclaimed that the United States "stand[s] for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas."  Google has become a particularly strong voice for this growing movement toward true openness, not merely the absence of censorship but also the active practice of business transparency, content fair use, and open technology.  Their strength in the field of technology is in no small part because of their politics, and while it is true that they submitted to censorship to enter Chinese markets in 2006, in many other ways they've continued investing in the "openness" movement at home (and, of course, sparking controversy within it).  [Read more after the jump]

Google has been making headlines recently over its decision to stop censoring its Chinese search engine, Google.cn, in response to attacks on its corporate infrastructure that targeted the Gmail accounts of human rights activists. Although this Google incident is a new development, Internet censorship in China has been a fact of life for years. If anything, the recent attack on Google is part of a larger trend, which started years ago and has been gathering steam since early 2008, of increased control and monitoring, both of Internet content and of China's own citizens as they get online in ever greater numbers.

The past several years have been dismal for proponents of Internet freedom in China: we've seen increasingly sophisticated censorship technology coupled with the rise of the "50 Cent Party," an army of youth who are paid 50 cents for every pro-government comment they write online; social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have been banned; the restive province of Xinjiang has had no Internet service whatsoever for six months now (although the government recently allowed access to a few state-run websites); and then there was Charter 08, the web-based manifesto promoting respect for human rights and peaceful democratic reforms in China. Originally signed by 303 concerned Chinese citizens from all walks of life, Charter 08 has gone on to collect over 10,000 signatures--but all references to Charter have since been deleted from Chinese websites and a key author of Charter 08, Liu Xiaobo, was sentenced on Christmas Day to eleven years in prison. [Read more]

...we're on the Huffington Post!　LRF's Washington, DC Director Nicole Kempton and our Deputy Director Megan Fluker are contributers to the "The Internet's Newspaper".

Make sure you check out their LRF related contributions China's Horrid One Child Policy Continues and Calling It Quits?.

Internet giant Google is threatening to pull out of China after a "sophisticated computer network attack originating [in China] targeted its email service and corporate infrastructure."  According to Google, "a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists."

While Google officials acknowledged that the "Gmail accounts of dozens of China human rights advocates in the United States, China, and Europe 'appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties," this is the first time that hackers have broken into Google's corporate infrastructure for this purpose. As such, Google will seriously "review the feasibility" of operating in China.

The work of human rights activists worldwide has been aided in developments of technology. Activists in China can email first-hand accounts of rights abuses and other information to their partners across the globe. Outside organizations can then help publicize this information and use it to raise awareness of the situation in China. When the security of this connection is breached, those involved face serious risk.

Several years ago, two Chinese democracy activists using Yahoo! email were put in the Laogai after Yahoo! disclosed their online activity to the Chinese government.  Bloggers, Twitters, and others who express dissent through various online means all face persecution by the CCP.

While we appreciate Google's realization that business in China can pose real threats (not just to activists, but also to corporate intellectual property), it's been a long time in coming. 

Since Google's arrival in China, Google has been more than willing to censor its search results, contributing to and enabling the repression and human rights abuses by the Chinese Communist Party. Hopefully, this latest event will be a wakeup call for all international businesses who engage in rights repression with the CCP.

There was a great op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday arguing that China's Internet censorship amounts to protectionism. That China has been censorsing and even blocking Western media entirely seems unfair from a free trade standpoint (and even makes their attempts to infiltrate the global news media market seem a bit hypocritical). This WSJ editorial notes that when China joined the WTO China agreed to "give unlimited access and equal treatment to foreign-based or foreign owned business in ... online services." And there is even precedent: China recently lost an appeal to the WTO and is now being forced to allow foreign books, movies, and music to be distributed freely (although China has not yet complied with the ruling).

Perhaps China could, depending on interpretation, block media services that receive funding from foreign governments, like the BBC or NPR. But when it comes to for-profit sites such as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter, all of which have been totally blocked in China for months now, there is no good economic argument to allow for the blocked access. China has the largest population of Internet users in the world, and these companies are being denied access by the Chinese government to what should be one of their greatest opportunities. This drives home the point that the choice between economic and political freedom that China has tried to make is simply impossible in a global economy that is based more and more on information rather than physical goods. China's restrictions on speech, particularly online, is directly causing companies based outside of China to lose money (i.e. protectionism).  (Read more after the jump)

And in this case, "local laws" means the Chinese government's censorship of the Dalai Lama and Rebiya Kadeer.  According to IDG News Service, "Apple appears to have blocked iPhone applications related to the Dalai Lama [and Rebiya Kadeer] in its China App Store."

The article continues "'Given that Apple has cooperated with China before (by not distributing games), it's of course very likely that it's Apple, not the developers, that are preventing certain apps from appearing,' said one China-based app developer, who asked not to be named, in an e-mail."

Scores of companies doing business in China willingly comply with the Chinese Government’s incessent demands to halt the free flow of information into and out of China. Google censors its Chinese search results. Sony installed the infamous Green Dam Software on its computers for sale in China. And Cisco's aid has been paramount in the development of all sorts of censorship and tracking technologies, most notably the Great Fire Wall.

Yahoo! even helped the Chinese government send two Chinese journalist to the Laogai by providing details of their online activity to the government.  “Both journalists were serving ten year sentences in prison for using the web to promote democracy, and both were sentenced after Yahoo! disclosed their other online data to the Chinese government,”  ABC News reported.

Of course, these businesses cooperate with the Chinese government for access to one of the world's largest growing consumer markets (read $$$).  Yet, in doing so, these companies invariably aid in the repression of human rights and the freedoms of Chinese citizens. Sounds like a good reason to enact the Global Online Freedom Act.

For  more on China's censorship, click here.

China’s Communist Party sure has had an embarrassing couple of weeks. Starting with its Green Dam Youth Escort public relations disaster, followed by outrage over the Party’s scapegoat attack on Google, and now, in an extremely telling event, China’s anti-corruption website crashed as users overwhelmed it.

The central government launched its “24-hour anti-corruption website and its accompany hotline number… to inform central government officials about local-level corruption,” the BBC reports.  Unsurprisingly, the number of Chinese citizens logging onto the site far exceeded the site’s capacity.