After the Chinese government objected to Google’s rerouting users to an uncensored site in Hong Kong, the company struggles to come up with another strategy to continue service in China. -db
The Wall Street Journal
June 29, 2010
By Amir Efrati and Andrew Batson
Google Inc. said it would change how Internet users in China access its search service after the Chinese government objected to its recent strategy of redirecting Chinese users to an uncensored site in Hong Kong and threatened the company with the loss of its license.
It’s unclear whether the small change to Google’s Chinese site will meet with Chinese government approval and lead to the extension of the company’s license to provide online content in China. Google said in a post on its blog late Monday that it had resubmitted its application to renew the license, which comes up for renewal as of Wednesday.
Since its entry into the Chinese-language world in 2000, U.S. search giant Google Inc. has struggled to balance its growth ambitious in the vast but restrictive new market while adhering to a self-held principle: “Don’t be evil.”
Google’s latest move comes three months after the Internet search giant said it would stop obeying the Chinese government’s requirement to censor search results, which It had been following since the China-based site opened in 2006. Since March, instead of providing censored search results, Google has automatically redirected users of google.cn, its mainland Chinese address, to a Hong Kong-based site, google.com.hk, which doesn’t censor search results.
But, according to a Google post on Monday, the Chinese government has told Google that its approach is “unacceptable” and that its Internet license won’t be renewed if it continues the practice. Chinese regulators frown on local Internet sites that link directly to foreign sites outside their control. Hong Kong, because it has a separate legal system, is treated as a foreign country in many areas of Chinese law, including censorship.
In response, Google said it would stop the automatic redirect, requiring that users take the additional step themselves. Visitors to google.cn are now presented with a message in Chinese that says, “We have moved to google.com.hk.” They must then click on an image to get to the Hong Kong site. Google doesn’t filter results on that site, although the Chinese government blocks certain results for users inside mainland China.
Other Google services that don’t require self-censoring by the company, such as maps, translations and music downloads, are still running on google.cn and can be accessed either directly or through the Hong Kong site. The main effect of the change is to make users of Google’s China site go through an additional step to search with Google. To avoid that, they could just sign on to the Hong Kong site directly.
Google also faces regulatory uncertainty in China over its fast-growing Goople Maps service. New rules issued last month require a government license to provide online maps in China, and it’s not clear how Google’s effort to obtain one is proceeding.
Reactions from Chinese Internet users on Tuesday ranged from skepticism that the new effort would work, to sympathy for Google’s trials with the government, to disdain for a company that is losing ground in the market. “Google is further away from us!” read a comment on the microblogging service of Sina, a major Chinese Internet portal. “If you want to leave, just leave!” said another.
Chinese government officials didn’t publicly react to the Google change. Wang Lijian, a spokesman for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said Tuesday that his agency had no immediate comment on the move.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, speaking at a regular press briefing Tuesday, said he hadn’t seen Google’s statement, and he didn’t comment on it directly. “I’d like to stress that the Chinese government encourages foreign enterprises to operate in China according to the law, and we also administer the Internet according to the law,” Mr. Qin said.
For sophisticated Internet users in China, the change seems trivial. “There’s no difference at all. We can still use it via google.com.hk, google.com.tw, google.com,” said Justin Zhang, a Google user in Shanghai, referring to the company’s site in Taiwan as well as its main global site. Even if Google’s license in China isn’t renewed, its services could still be accessed through those offshore sites, he said.
But the change does make using Google more complicated and less intuitive than other Chinese search engines, which could push the company further out of the mainstream of the local Internet market.
According to figures from Analysys International, Google’s market share in China declined to 31% in the 2010 first quarter from 35.6% in the previous quarter, with Chinese rival Baidu Inc. benefiting at Google’s expense. Analysts have estimated that Google’s Chinese business is small and previously accounted for just 1% to 2% of the company’s net revenue.
Google said its new strategy is an attempt to comply with local regulations while still meeting its pledge not to censor search results. “This new approach is consistent with our commitment not to self censor and, we believe, with local law,” wrote David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, in Monday’s blog post. “We are therefore hopeful that our license will be renewed on this basis so we can continue to offer our Chinese users services via Google.cn.”
Finding the right balance between open access to information and local sensibilities has been a challenge for many Internet companies in many countries. In India and Thailand, for example, Google and others have removed material that their governments found objectionable or that violated local laws. In Thailand, Google’s YouTube video service blocks access to videos that might be seen to insult the king, which is against the law there. In some parts of Europe, where Nazi imagery is illegal, Google blocks access to that.
But dealing with China’s extensive online-censorship requirements has been a particular struggle for the company. In January Google cited a major cyberattack in which hackers stole some of the company’s proprietary computer code and spied on the Google email accounts of Chinese human-rights activists.
Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder and its chief of technology, said in a March interview with The Wall Street Journal that after that attack he pushed the company to end its self-censoring of search results in China, arguing that the country’s Web censorship had the “earmarks of totalitarianism.”
Sue Feng, Bai Lin and J.R. Wu contributed to this article.
Copyright 2010 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.