Winner of Google-China feud is - India
China Economic Forum
By: Peter Lee
Google isn't doing well in China, and President Barack Obama isn't
doing well in the United States. These twin realities have helped
trigger a high-profile confrontation with China.
On January 12, Google responded to a sophisticated hack of its
Google.cn servers, apparently emanating from within China, with the
threat that it would stop filtering its Google.cn search results in
compliance with the demands of the Chinese government, even if that
meant Google would have to close its China operations.
Google's high-profile response will contribute, perhaps inadvertently,
to fraught broader US-China relations in the coming year. Inevitably,
the attractiveness of China's emerging rival, India, as a market for
Google and ally for the United States will enter into the mix.
In contrast to its also-ran status behind Baidu in China for search
engines, the travails of its Youtube service as a frequently-blocked
avenue for dissent inside China and the absence of a social networking
option inside the People's Republic of China), Google enjoys an
overwhelming market share for its search engine, media and networking
business in India.
In India, 89% of Internet searches go through Google, 68% of India's
social networking occurs on Google's Orkut service, and 82% of media
is viewed on Youtube, according to the Internet marketing research
company comscore.com. Astonishingly, Indian users spend almost 30% of
their entire online time on Google sites - three times the world's
average.
Ironically - or, perhaps, hypocritically, given its stalwart anti-
censorship position in China - Google censors its search engine
results in India to conform to Indian laws (for instance, banning
search results for pre-natal sex testing) [1] and cooperates with
Indian police to identify political malcontents for arrest in response
to their Orkut postings. [2]
Google's high-profile demolition of its relationship with China may
not simply be a matter of outrage at the hacking of pro-democracy e-
mails.
Bruce Schneier, a well-known US cyber security expert, made waves in
the IT community with an op-ed on CNN on January 23 [3] asserting that
the e-mail hacker had obtained the e-mail information by accessing
Google's own internal intercept system - a program designed to enable
Google to collect user information in response to US government
demands.
If this is the case, the e-mail hack is more of an embarrassment for
Google than anything else: an indication that Google had not only
created the application to enable governments to spy on e-mail
accounts, it had done such a poor job of protecting it that it could
be hijacked by malicious parties.
The actual significance of the e-mail hack is open to question.
Only a handful of accounts were accessed, and apparently yielded no
more information than the kind that the US government is supposed to
get in response to a subpoena: account information and subject line.
No message text was compromised, according to Google.
In a January 21 conference call with financial analysts, Google
executive Eric Schmidt stated that Google wasn't even sure that the e-
mail intrusion was related to the larger hack, now known as the Aurora
exploit.
Aurora was a sophisticated, simultaneous industry-wide penetration of
sensitive computers at Google, Adobe and perhaps more than two dozen
other Silicon Valley companies, possibly a "zero day" attack intended
to exploit an intrinsic weakness in Internet Explorer (IE) for maximum
effect before the attack itself compelled Microsoft to issue a patch
to plug the leak.
The target of this multi-front blitzkrieg was apparently a quest for
IT's crown jewels - source code.
This cyber-sparring between Western high-tech companies and Chinese
hackers is a historical albeit worrisome feature of the complicated
relationship between US IT companies and the large Chinese market they
hope to serve.
The large scale and synchronized timing of the assault has caused the
target companies to point the finger, albeit gingerly and with
caveats, directly at the Chinese government.
It is an open question whether the scale of the attack reflects
Chinese government involvement, or an awareness of the transient
nature of IE vulnerability and the resultant desire of networked
private or semi-private Chinese hackers to exploit the flaw massively
before it could be discovered and repaired.
Another anxious aspect was added to the case as rumors spread that
Google suspected that a Chinese employee of its organization inside
China may have facilitated Aurora's intrusion onto a computer with
administrative privileges, thereby opening significant domains of the
Google realm to inspection and downloading by the hackers.
However, Google took an important and inflammatory step of escalating
its conflict with China by using the e-mail hack against democracy
advocates to wrap itself in a human-rights flag. As a result, its
threat to stop censoring its Google.cn search engine in retaliation
for the hacks has become a cause celebre for free speech and Internet-
rights activists.
This cause has been taken up by the US government.
The Obama administration is smarting from its devastating political
defeat in the Massachusetts senate election, a defeat that has removed
the Democrat Party's supermajority and put it on track for possible
electoral catastrophe at November's mid-term congressional elections -
unless it can rally its disaffected base of liberal and progressive
voters. Thus, Obama's government is set to embark on a populist anti-
banking campaign inside the US and a crowd-pleasing anti-China
campaign internationally.
Google's emergence as a champion of Internet openness is, in a certain
sense, rather ironic. Its data-collection capabilities extend from
cookies to click-logging, which involves the recording of a user's
search terms for two years and has aroused the concern of the European
Union, the US government and privacy advocates. The tools are likely
the envy of China's busy public and Internet security monitors.
Google is no stranger to cooperation with security services in the
United States as well as abroad.
Google has an intimate relationship with the US intelligence
community. It acquired one of its signature services - Google Earth -
from the Central Intelligence Agency's acknowledged not-for-profit
venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. As part of a one-hand-washes-the-other
synergism between the private and public sector, In-Q-Tel's director
of technology assessment, Rob Painter, moved to Google in 2005 to
become chief technologist for federal business. His main job: selling
Google Earth imagery back to the government.
The company itself is secretive not only about the precious algorithm
that drives its world-beating search engine, but about everything
else. Despite enjoying the benefits of being a publicly-traded
company, its ownership is structured to enable close control by its
founding members. It accumulates gigantic amounts of data concerning
its users - including information from the over 75 billion Google
searches, 10 billion Youtube views and hundreds of millions of
Doubleclick ad page views per month they undertake - so it can target
them with advertising tailored to their needs and weaknesses.
In an unintentionally ironic twist, Google chief executive officer
Eric Schmidt turned the company's ballyhooed motto - Don't Be Evil -
into a warning to Google's users in an interview with CNBC in December
2009. [4]
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you
shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Schmidt said. "If you
really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -
including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's
important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States
to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could
be made available to the authorities."
Google is committed to an open Internet because this provides the
maximum leverage for its competitive advantage as the pre-eminent
search engine. Google also relies on the open Internet to allow it to
collect the full spectrum of data that allows it to characterize and
exploit the monetary potential of its users.
The one area in which Google cannot tolerate openness is in the one
area the hackers targeted: the secrets of its search engine.
It would not be surprising if Google decided to make a public issue of
the December 2009 intrusions in order to get the Chinese government to
crack down on hackers within its borders, be they public or private
actors.
Perhaps it discounted the risk of Chinese displeasure with the
rationalization that, ultimately, Google's future probably lies in
India, not China.
It doesn't appear that Google stirred the China pot with very much
forethought. According to an inside account [5], following an urgent
Christmas Eve confab convened by Google founder Larry Page, the
situation percolated for three weeks before Google made its shock
announcement on January 12.
Google's industry and international associates were apparently not in
the loop.
Bill Gates of Microsoft and John Chambers, chief executive officer of
Cisco Systems, went public with statements dismissing Google's
sensitivities on the Aurora hack.
India was unprepared to do anything more than respond with vague
generalities concerning the openness of its Internet and its
suitability as a partner for Google.
One may wonder if Google anticipated the diplomatic firestorm it would
ignite by going public with its conflict with China.
In the January 21 conference call, Google's Eric Schmidt stated his
desire to remain in China. Indeed, there are reports of negotiations
concerning modifications to the filtering restrictions under which
Google search engine works in China.
Even if Google embarked on this path with the limited objective of
leveraging international indignation over the hack into concessions by
the Chinese authorities to relax the Google.cn search engine filtering
regime in a meaningful way (thereby earning Google human-rights
credibility and positioning Google.cn as a service returning superior
in-China results compared to its nemesis, Baidu), that ship has
probably sailed.
Simply walking back the tense situation and negotiating some kind of
symbolic, face-saving compromise on filtering of search-engine results
may also be out of reach, thanks to the rapid escalation of political
rhetoric by the Obama administration.
In a speech in Washington on January 21, Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton planted the US government flag as champion of the "right to
connect" to an open Internet. Echoing the phrase of British statesman
Winston Churchill that announced the beginning of the Cold War between
the Soviet Union and the West, she talked of an "information
curtain" (rather than an iron curtain) descending across the world at
the behest of totalitarian regimes.
Clearly, the lengthy speech was prepared long in advance to burnish
America's information age luster. Equally clear was the fact that one
paragraph was inserted about the Google case at the last minute.
Clinton issued a call that the Chinese government investigate the
Google case "transparently", implying in effect that China had a
responsibility to mollify foreign stakeholders based on Google's so
far undocumented public assertions:
And we look to the Chinese authorities to conduct a thorough
review of the cyber intrusions that led Google to make its
announcement. And we also look for that investigation and its results
to be transparent.
Open-society advocates lauded the tough American approach, even as IT
professionals pointed out the awkward fact that the US itself
embargoes Internet software - including Google's Chrome browser - to
deny the benefits of Internet openness to users within Syria, Sudan
and other countries.
The Chinese government - which has labored mightily to create an
international regime in which China is an acknowledged superpower and
not the target of condescending and embarrassing demands for
transparency - responded with predictable heat.
China's Ministry of Foreign Relations denounced Clinton's call,
stating, "We urge the US to respect facts and stop attacking China
under the excuse of the so-called freedom of Internet."
China's Global Times accused the United States of "information
imperialism".
According to an Associated Press report [7], the US government seems
willing to up the ante:
Washington, meanwhile, carried its message on Internet freedom
directly to Chinese bloggers. The US Embassy in Beijing and consulates
in Shanghai and Guangzhou hosted Internet-streamed discussions with
members of the blogging community on Friday afternoon - the latest
example of Washington's outreach to Chinese bloggers as a way of
spreading its message.
The bloggers met with US diplomats from the political, economic
and public affairs sections, who held discussions and answered
questions about Clinton's speech. The meetings were similar to a
session organized during Obama's visit to China in November.
It would appear that nothing good for US-China relations will come of
this. Perhaps the United States doesn't care too much.
In a widely-linked comment entitled "The Google news : China enters
its Bush-Cheney era" [8], the Atlantic Monthly's James Fallows saw the
Google case as a regrettable hardening of Chinese attitudes towards
the US just as America was entering the halcyon period of the Obama
administration.
It is more likely that the Obama administration, with the world
financial system stabilized and Chinese goodwill a less vital
commodity than before, and its own political fortunes in jeopardy, has
found it politically expedient and feasible to harden towards China.
The fallout will perhaps be an accelerated slide by Google - and the
United States - into the Indian camp.