Internet with Borders

There are over 100 million internet users in China, the most in any country other than the United States. Chinese internet users are just like us – they like surfing and blogging and podcasting and shopping. It was once thought that the seamless communication across borders allowed by the internet would break down authoritarian information controls rampant in China and elsewhere. By providing access to global information and news sources, it was thought, the borderless internet could help democratize the globe.

January 2006 has not been a good month for that theory.

Just after the new year, Microsoft shut down the blog of a Chinese journalist at the request of the Chinese government. And this week, Google announced that it had created a new Chinese search engine that filters out controversial phrases like “democracy,” “human rights,” “Tibet,” and “Tiananmen Square” in order to comply with Chinese internet restrictions.

What these search engines have done is perfectly understandable from a business perspective. Through the lens of shareholder profit, forfeiting access to over 100 million potential users would be unwise bordering on financially irresponsible. Even considering the interests of ordinary Chinese people, the argument articulated by both Microsoft and Google – essentially, it is better for us to be there with limited service than to offer Chinese users no service at all – is compelling. If Chinese users truly are like us, the majority are using the internet more for online video games than for fermenting dissent anyway. No need to punish these users by denying them Google – how could we live without Google? – just because they happen to live in a repressive country.

But there is something unsettling about the willingness of these internet companies to bow to the whims of the Chinese government in the interest of market share. By acquiescing to the censorship and investigative demands of the Chinese, Microsoft and Google have become enforcers of what both would admit are unreasonable laws. Two years ago, Yahoo went even further, providing government officials the information necessary to capture and imprison another Chinese journalist. While this is particularly troublesome in repressive China, the real problem is that the underlying urge to comply with local law to gain access to more consumers is not limited to one country. As articulated by Rebecca MacKinnon at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, “Can we be sure they won’t do the same thing in response to potentially illegal demands by an overzealous government agency in our own country?”

This hypothetical seems less hypothetical in the wake of recent charges of warrantless government eavesdropping. To their credit, search engines have thus far consistently refused to turn over personally-identifiable information unless compelled by a valid and narrow warrant or subpoena. Still, AOL alone responds to over a thousand such warrants and subpoenas each month, often without the opportunity to notify users that their info has been divulged.

We are fortunate to live in a country that recognizes the rights to free speech and due process, so we need not worry ourselves as much when Google becomes an agent of the government. Still, the precedent set in China is not a good one. Both a privacy debate and a censorship debate are happening in China, and internet search companies are siding with the government there.

The internet, it appears, does have borders after all.