Why Google Quit Chinaand Why Its Heading Back - The Atlantic 19/09/2017, 8*16 PM

Why Google Quit China

and Why Its Heading
Back
When American Internet companies do business abroad, they are
sometimes forced to do a repressive governments dirty work.

Andy Wong / AP

KAVEH WADDELL | JAN 19, 2016 | TECHNOLOGY

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When Google shut down its Chinese search engine in 2010, it gave up access

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to an enormous market. There are more than twice as many people on the
Internet in China as there are residents in the U.S., and the number of
Chinese Internet users is growing at a rate that far surpasses that of any other
country. Google has plans to return to China in the near future, but why did it
turn away from the country for so long?

Censorship is why. Google eectively shut down its Chinese operations after
it discovered a cyberattack from within the country that targeted it and dozens
of other companies. And while investigating the attack, Google found that the
Gmail accounts of a number of Chinese human-rights activists had been
hacked.

Google had set up shop in China four years before the breach, oering a
version of its services that conformed to the governments oppressive
censorship policies. At the time, Google ocials said theyd decided that the
most ethical option was to oer some servicesalbeit restricted by Chinas
censorsto the enormous Chinese market, rather than leave millions of
Internet users with limited access to information.

But the 2010 attacks prompted the company to reverse course. Instead of
complying with government requests to lter its search results, Google
directed all of its Chinese trac to the uncensored Hong Kong version of its
search engine, a move that left the company vulnerable to being completely
shut down in China. Indeed, Googles services became inaccessible to most
Chinese users within months.

Googles move to pull the plug in China is an extreme example of the kinds of
decisions Internet companies operating abroad are often up against: If they
want to do business, they have to abide by local laws, which can include
restrictions on speech. And since the United States has some of the most
permissive freedom-of-speech laws in the world, American companies must
adapt in order to do business even in parts of the world that are culturally very

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similar to the U.S.

Western European countries, which receive top marks from Freedom House
for online openness, are far less tolerant than the U.S. of hateful speech and
images. In Germany, where distributing swastikas is considered hate speech
and is illegal, regulators recently investigated a complaint that Facebook was
not adequately enforcing national hate-speech law. But its inconceivable that
Facebook would close down its service in Germany just because the
government asks for more censorship than the First Amendment would
permit.

In countries with more repressive governments, companies routinely receive

requests to take down a much wider range of content that violates local laws.
In Russia, for example, speaking ill of public ocials can lead to costly libel
suits; just across the Black Sea, insulting Turkishness is punishable by nes
and jail time.

There are a few things that

companies can do to push back
against censorship-happy
governments without losing access
to an entire country.

Lee Rowland, a senior sta attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union,
says companies should generally submit to governments requests for
censorship, if it means they can keep delivering their services. But when they
take down content from their platform, Rowland says, the company must be

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transparent.

If these companies do whatever theyre capable of doing to publicize that

their content is being screened, monitored, and sometimes censored by
governments, I think theres a really good argument that maintaining a social-
media presence is inherently a liberalizing force, Rowland said.

To that end, Google, Facebook, and Twitter all publish a detailed annual
transparency report, where they show the number and type of content-
takedown or user-information requests they received, and the number they
complied with, from each country where they operate. The companies also lay
out their rationale for dealing with these requests: Facebook, for example,
says it checks every incoming request for legal suciency and reject[s] or
require[s] greater specicity on requests that are overly broad or vague. But
even the most thorough transparency report can be dicult to access in the
countries where the reported censorship is taking place.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a prominent Internet-privacy advocate at New America,

says companies should start thinking about how they will deal with free-
speech issues even before they start doing business in a repressive state. Its
about anticipating in advance what positions youre going to be put in, and
deciding in advance whether thats an acceptable position to be in,
MacKinnon said. Many companies undergo a human-rights impact
assessment before they expand to a new market with potential censorship
pitfalls.

The calculus that goes into making decisions about free speech abroad is
complicated. But there are few things that companies can do to push back
against censorship-happy governments without losing access to an entire
country.

Companies can set up stringent review processes for legal takedown requests.

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A stringent review can make sure governments arent taking advantage of

Internet companies to censor content outside the bounds of the law, and
thorough reporting and transparent policies can spur local activism to change
repressive laws.

Twitter is an interesting test case. As with any company, its tolerance for
complying with government requests can be gleaned from its actions.
Twitters transparency report shows a sharp rise in takedown requests in
2015, driven in large part by a high volume of requests from Turkey and
Russia; the company continues to operate in both of those countries.

In Iran, however, where Twitter has been blocked for more than ve years,
Twitter has made changes to accommodate Iranian users that are able to
circumvent their governments Internet lters. The company recently began
allowing users with Iranian phone numbers to activate two-factor
authentication, a login option which can protect accounts from being hacked.
Rowland called Twitters actions in Iran the ethical high-water mark for
resisting government attempts to censor access to content.

(A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on the companys legal and

business decision-making, and spokespeople for Google and Facebook were
not available to comment on this story.)

When deciding how to deal with censorship abroad, companies arent going at
it alone. The Global Network Initiative, a privacy and digital human-rights
organization, provides a roadmap for companies navigating business in
repressive legal environments. GNI members represent for-prot companies
including Google and Facebookinvestors, and nonprot and academic
organizations.

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Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt speaks at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in
2013. (Bobby Yip / Reuters)

MacKinnon, who was a founding member of GNI and sits on its board, says
the organization provides a space for companies who are up against tough
choices to confer with other members, academics, and privacy advocates, in
order to make informed decisions. But she says most companies are too
preoccupied chasing short-term prots to put too much time and energy into
implementing long-term free-speech protections. GNI has at least put a
framework in place thats preventing things from being much worse than
theyd otherwise be, MacKinnon said.

Companies that do business abroadeven just in Europeare dealing with an

increasing number of government requests for content takedowns every year.
Europes two-year old right to be forgotten, a European Union decision that
allows citizens to ask Google to remove links to misleading, inaccurate, or
irrelevant information about them, has opened a whole new category of

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content takedown requests. And growing worry that terrorist groups like the
Islamic State are using social platforms to recruit and spread propaganda
means that more governments are on the lookout for content that promotes
terrorism, which typically violates platforms terms of service.

But while terms-of-service violations can result in bans and content

takedowns, most Internet companies dont report them in their transparency
reports. This is a problem, says Rowland, because a government thats
particularly active in agging terms-violating content for removal is
essentially engaging in a dierent form of censorship.

The United Kingdom, for example, has taken special advantage of agging
tools, and at least one counter-terrorism unit in the U.K. government has been
granted super-agger status to request YouTube video takedowns, allowing
it to ag violations en masse.

One reason some companies dont report takedowns of content that violates
their terms of service is because they cant tell which requests come from
governments. A spokesman for Twitter said governments are required to use
the same mechanism for agging tweets, photos, and accounts as the general
public must use. The spokesperson said requests for takedowns based on
terms-of-service violations are very rare.

Even as requests for takedowns increase every year, companies are engaging
more and more with the governments that issue them. Take China: Google is
hiring for dozens of positions there as it prepares its reentry, and is working
toward an agreement to oer an app store for Android devices that would only
include government-approved apps. In Pakistan, Google launched a localized
version of YouTube last week that will adhere to local law, in a bid to get the
government to lift a ban on the service.

These expansions will allow Google access to a large number of Internet

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users, delivering them more information, and at the same time bolstering the
companys bottom line. But for the millions of Internet users in China,
Pakistan, and other places where censorship is the norm, the tradeo for
getting to use new services remains the same: Easily accessible information
comes at the cost of continued government control, ltered through American
Internet companies.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KAVEH WADDELL is a former staff writer at The Atlantic.

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