Issues in Cyberspace

A blog for JASS 403 @ UM-D!

Monday, February 1, 2010

Google vs China





It has been about two weeks since Google announced that they would pull out of China if they did not relax their censorship laws. Google made this decision based upon a secuirty breach in December. Since the announcement, ISEdb.com has reported five main things have occured;

"1) China Stands Firm: stating, 'there was little room to compromise in the area of internet security.'

2) Google Boss Schmidt replies Google would like to stay: saying, 'Google would like to stay if China relaxes its censorship policies.'

3) Fake Google appears in China: 'a site called, Goojje has appeared'

4) Twitter may be blocked in China, too: 'Co-Founder Evan Willams announced twitter was partially blocked in China...however there are ways around the firewalls.'

5) China reports it won't limit use of Android: "China will not be limiting the use of Google's Android operating system.' "

China is one of the world's top internet markets. The graph below shows that in October of 2007, China was just under the United States in terms of most internet users by country. However, since 2007, the tables may have turned and China may now be in the lead of internet users per country.
Graph found at: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/18/the-web-in-charts%E2%80%94google-vs-microsoft-yahoo-vs-china/


The announcement that Google would pull out of China was seen by many human rights advocates aroumd the world as a step in the right direction. In the NYTimes forum on Google vs. China, we learn that, "Since China isn't likely to allow unfiltered results, which would bring banned topics, Google would have to quit operating google.cn, it's Chinese search engine."


However, there are many ways around such issues. As mentioned previously, when Twitter co-founder Evan Willams announced that Twitter was partially banned in China, he also added that there are ways around the firewalls. From the NYTimes forum we see, "The very tech savvy are starting to work around the government filters."





There are many ways to avoid and bypass firewalls in China. An article from the NYTimes helps to outline some, "They are using a variety of tools to evade government filters to reach the wide-open Web that the Chinese government deems dangerous - sites like YouTube, Facebook and, if Google makes good on its threat to withdraw from China, Google.cn."
Image found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/technology/internet/16evade.html

The article continues by saying, "It's difficult to say precisely how many people in China engage in acts of digital disobedience. But college students in China and activists around the world say the number has been growing ever since the government stepped up efforts to 'cleanse' the Web during the Beijing Olympics and the Communist regime's 60th anniversary last year."

The Washington Post reports, "The company's (Google's) decision to stop censoring it's Chinese search engine is more likely to mean the end of China-based service than a breakdown of Beijing's political firewall. But more important than the question of whether Google.cn survives is the larger issue that Google has now raised for other Western companies and democratic governments -- which is whether China's gross and growing abuse of the Internet should be quietly tolerated or actively resisted."

Personally, I think that China has succeeded thus far in their censorship of the internet, but since so many of their citizens are able to break through "The Great Firewall" of China, that the government needs to give up their fight and make it easier for everyone and stop censoring the world wide web from their citizens.
On a personal note, in Feb. 2008, I took a trip to China and I was there for about two weeks. I went with my aunt, uncle, and cousin. They adopted a baby girl, and asked me to come along. Our plan was to create a blog and document our trip so that our friends and family back home could read and watch along. The blog is: http://ruth-china.blogspot.com/ It was through the same blog website we are using for class. We had heard from numerous other families that this was the best blog to use over there because of all the censorship laws.
As we arrived in China and began to blog about our adventures, we were unable to view them. It was the most annoying thing to not know if the content had actually been posted or not. We knew that we hit the "Publish Post" button, but we had no idea if what we wanted posted actually posted or not. We also realized that we were allowed to submit photos to be posted on the blog, but it would not allow us to post videos; we just hoped that people back home could see them, since we couldn't. Come to find out, when we arrived back home, we had numerous comments from family and friends about how cute and amazing all of the photos were and how much they enjoyed watching and reading about our trip through the blog.
In the end, we wished that censorship had not played a role in our trip, as we would have loved to read all of the comments from the friends and family that we had missed back home, but it was unavoidable for us.
Photo of my uncle, cousin, aunt and I on the Great Wall of China.


Sites I used and for more information, please visit:





My Family's Blog from China: http://ruth-china.blogspot.com/



3 comments:

  1. Kara, very nice research on China and your photo illustrations. I agree that people or netizens will always be able to use "The Long Tail" because the internet is so infinite and busy with traffic, that people will always be able to get around governmet filters to show what the governments don't want the rest of the world to see. good job

    ReplyDelete
  2. I do agree that the very tech savvy will find a way to lift part of the Netizen's plight of not having access to many websites. With Google pulling out of China, I don't think there will be much difference in the country. I guess maybe people lose their Gmail and such, but the government already had harsh restrictions imposed. What difference would it really make? Plus the country has their number search engine baidu.com ready to be used at all times. It's the ultimate filterd search engine by a dictatorship government.

    Your research was well done with great pictures. I like how the background of your blog page is like a sheet of paper that would be found in a library book.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for sharing the personal story! There's no better illustration of the situation at hand than that experience.

    btw, I hadn't come across the twitter stuff while doing my assignment. I don't quite understand what's going on there...

    ReplyDelete