Google was going to help democratise data in China. Instead, about three years after entering the Middle Kingdom, the search company still finds itself in an uncomfortable working relationship with government censors.
For about eight days between 3 June and 11 June, Google.cn blocked all results that might come from searches for Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Not just politically sensitive results, not just historical accounts of the deaths on 4 June, 1989, but every single result — including directions to the square — with an error message that read: "Search results cannot be displayed as they may contain contents that do not comply to related laws and policy".
As of Thursday, things appeared to have returned to normal. A search for 'Tiananmen Square' in either English or Chinese brought up links to shops in the area, historical documents about one of China's most storied places, and images of fun, happy times in downtown Beijing.
So how did Google know it was supposed to drop the hammer on all results for Tiananmen Square for that brief period of time? And how did it know that it was once again safe to reapply the limited filter?
Google is not saying, beyond pointing to previous interviews and statements it has given on its tricky balancing act in China. "Google.cn complies with Chinese laws. The differences in search results over time in China are the result of a variety of factors, including the content that is available on the internet and the regulations we follow in China," the company said in a statement last week.
But it has confirmed that Google has dropped a previous method of determining how to self-censor its search results — pinging the so-called Great Firewall of China to see what sites are blocked — in favour of a new self-censorship method that the company refuses to disclose.
Difficult choices
Google's formal entry into China in 2006 with Google.cn forced the company to strike a difficult balance between its stated goal of making the world's information widely available and the requirement that all internet companies doing business in China adhere to government regulations regarding censorship.
In some ways, Google has improved the flow of information in China. Upon entering the market, it made sure to include a disclaimer (like the one above) alongside search results for sensitive queries, something even Baidu does now. That decision allowed Chinese internet searchers to know they were not getting the full extent of what was available on the internet for a given query.
In addition, a study published by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab in June 2008 found that Google is the least censored search engine in China. Google is the second-most widely used search engine in China, behind Baidu.
In the past, company executives have justified Google's censored presence in China with a glass-three-quarters-full analogy: it's better to offer Chinese internet users access to a wealth of information they might be otherwise unable to find at the expense of "pulling a few books out of the library", so to speak.
They are also, of course, unwilling to miss out on perhaps the greatest internet land rush of the 21st century as China's massive population continues to come online.
However, determining which books to leave and which books to pull is not an easy task. Google representatives over the past week pointed repeatedly to an article in The New York Times from 2006 that described Google's methodology for making those tough choices.
According to the article: "Brin's team had one more challenge to confront: how to determine which sites to block? The Chinese government wouldn't give them a list. So Google's engineers hit on a high-tech solution. They set up a computer inside China and programmed it to try to access websites outside the country, one after another. If a site was blocked by the firewall, it meant the government regarded it as illicit — so it became part of Google's blacklist."
That system is no longer in place, Google representatives confirmed. Despite repeated inquiries, no information was made available...
