Google China Attacks Presage Battle With U.S. to Shape Internet

[Commonground]

January 13, 2010, 04:06 AM EST

Jan. 13 (Bloomberg) -- 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.?


--Michael Forsythe. With assistance from Indira Lakshmanan in Washington and Susan Li in Hong Kong. Editors: Bill Austin, Mark Williams


To contact the editor responsible for this story: Bill Austin at +813-3201-8952 or billaustin@bloomberg.net.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-13/google-china-attacks-presage-battle-with-u-s-to-shape-internet.html

[Pathfinder]

Re: Google China Attacks Presage Battle With U.S. to Shape Internet

Google exit from China could change face of Internet

Vito Pilieci in Ottawa and Aileen McCabe in Shanghai, Canwest News Service Published: Wednesday, January 13, 2010

An Internet security expert who has been asked by Google to explore hacking attempts on that company from China says the rift between the two could forever change the face of the Internet.

Google said it stopped censoring its Chinese search engine Google.cn on Wednesday after it discovered evidence hackers inside China were targeting the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights dissidents and some 20 Chinese and international companies.

Google vice-president David Drummond refused to speculate whether the Chinese government was behind the attacks. He said Google might have to pull all of its operations out of China because "we simply cannot continue to operate a filtered or censored search engine."

Rafal Rohozinski, chief executive of Ottawa's SecDev Group, has been consulting with Google since mid-December when it was discovered that numerous systems within the company had been hacked by Chinese-based attackers.

While compliance with Beijing's censorship rules paved the way for Google's entry into the Chinese market in 2006, "they (Google) are hauling China onto the carpet and saying, ?We are no longer willing to play along with these games no matter what it costs us,' " said Mr. Rohozinski.

Removing Google from China could have groundshaking effects across the Internet, he added.

While Google is not the largest search engine in that country - Baidu.cn attracts more than 58% of all Internet searches from China - its ability to index and search through millions of Chinese websites opens that country's digital borders to the world. Blocking Google from indexing those sites would effectively create a bubble around China and hinder international access to one of the fastest growing economies on the planet.

"Basically the business model that has allowed companies like Google to exist, which is a global unified unfettered Internet cloud, will be replaced by national Internet clouds or clouds that belong to coalitions of countries which decide who and who cannot access resources from within those clouds," said Mr. Rohozinski. "They are radically altering the entire structure of cyberspace."

He fears other nations may follow, creating a domino effect that could lead to several countries setting up similar digital borders.

"We would be in a completely new era of the Internet," he said. "This is something that will play out over the coming weeks and months and will really signify the future of China in cyberspace and the future of global cyberspace."

The discovery of the attacks also exposed a string of other malicious activities, including network attacks on at least 20 other high-tech companies as well as the use of targeted computer viruses to spy on the G-mail accounts of several well-known Chinese dissidents.

Reaction on the Internet was immediate.

"Moushanfu" wrote on the social network Twitter: "I told several people born after 1980 (under 30 years) in my company that Google China planned to pull out of China and had unblocked some sensitive words. They were excited and started to search by words like ?June 4' and ?Tianamen.' "

On Google.cn Wednesday, both those search terms produced pictures from the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Such photos are usually hidden by censors, deep behind the "Great Firewall of China," and rarely, if ever, seen by ordinary Internet users.

While Beijing appeared to drag its feet in closing down uncensored Google searches Wednesday, it moved quickly to minimize any embarrassing fallout the company's announcement might cause the government. According to several sources, government-controlled newspapers across the country were ordered not to write their own news stories about the Google decision, rather to use only stories produced by the official Xinhua News Agency or the People's Daily.

Also, comments favourable to Google on Chinese blogs and web portals began disappearing during the afternoon and were replaced by posts suggesting Google made a bad business decision which it would come to regret.

Google's hardline stance gathered steam when search engine competitor Yahoo! Inc. announced late Wednesday that it was "aligned" with Google and would support the company in its efforts to push back against the Chinese government.

Facebook and Twitter, which have resisted the government's requests to filter content, have been banned from the country.



Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2438041#ixzz0cavEOouN