Google is urging the U.S. government to make net censorship a part of its trade and diplomatic negotiations, even as it holds out hope that China does not start blocking its uncensored Hong Kong servers, where Google.cn users have been diverted since Monday.
Not unexpectedly, Google came in for heavy congressional praise Wednesday at a hearing of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. But perhaps more telling for industry at large is that Google has seemingly set a precedent that other companies — namely Microsoft — are being measured against and that pressure on the software giant is likely just starting.
New Jersey Congressman Chris Smith (R), a sponsor of the Global Internet Freedom Act, lashed out at Microsoft, whose executives have scoffed at Google’s decision to leave China.
“They need to get with the program and join with the side of human rights, instead of being on the side of tyranny as they are today,” Smith said in his opening remarks.
By contrast, Smith called Google’s decision to re-route its censored China site to its largely unfiltered Hong Kong site, “a remarkable, historic and welcome action.” Google entered China in 2006, agreeing to censor sensitive political search results so long as they could tell users when that was happening, but found that censorship got even tighter, rather than loosening — leading it to declare in January it could no longer compromise its principles.
Microsoft, it seems, now finds itself on the wrong side of the engagement/boycott debate, at least as far as the political winds are blowing, even though its search share in China is minuscule compared to the 20 percent Google share has had and the 60 percent the Chinese-owned Baidu enjoys.
Like so many manufacturing companies before it, Microsoft argues that its business in countries like China has a liberalizing effect.
In an e-mailed statement, Microsoft said:
We appreciate that different companies may make different decisions based on their own experiences and views. At Microsoft we remain committed to advancing free expression through active engagement in over 100 countries, even as we comply with the laws in every country in which we operate. We have done business in China for more than 20 years and we intend to continue our business there. We also regularly communicate with governments, including the Chinese, to advocate for free expression, transparency, and the rule of law. We will continue to do so. We believe engagement in global markets is important, as an open and healthy Internet involves not only access to information, but access to network connectivity, computing power, innovative and easy-to-use software applications, and the basic IT skills needed to leverage these capabilities.
But on Wednesday, the pressure increased even more as yet another online giant — GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain registrar, announced it was ceasing its business with China over internet censorship. GoDaddy announced it would stop selling .CN domain names, since it found China’s new dictates that it collect detailed personal information, including a photograph, on every domain holder too invasive.
“We decided we didn’t want to become an agent of the Chinese government,” GoDaddy general counsel Christine Jones told the committee.
Other companies will soon begin to feel the same pressure as Microsoft, according to Eddan Katz, the international affairs director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“What Google did sets a certain threshold for the responsibility that companies have to contributing to an infrastructure of repression,” Katz told Wired.com in a phone interview. “Other companies will be asked to disclose what they are dong, and how far they are complicated in the machinery of the surveillance system.”
Some tech companies have already found themselves in that spotlight, well before Google’s decision. Cisco has been widely criticized for selling its router and firewall technology to the Chinese, knowing that it would be used for filtering. Yahoo executives found themselves hauled in front of Congress after it aided the Chinese government’s arrest of dissidents including by turning over e-mails, despite having good reason to suspect the inquiries were politically motivated. Yahoo has since joined the Global Network Initiative, reduced its presence in China, and in Vietnam, kept its e-mail servers outside of the Communist country and thus, out of the reach of legal orders.
Google’s Alan Davidson told the panel that it had only seen intermittent censorship so far of Chinese mainland users using its Google.com.hk site, though it realizes that the Chinese government could expand the censorship at any time.
Test using WebSitePulse show that many formerly blocked searches, such as one for the blocked religion Falun Gong, return full search results to Chinese users. However, many of the results, such as Falun Gong’s Wikipedia entry, are blocked.
Davidson, formerly of the Center for Democracy and Technology, described internet censor ship as a “growing threat” that requires coordinated responses from companies, governments and civil society groups.
And while Google has taken pains to say that it made its decision independently of the U.S. government, Davidson says that the U.S. government needs to be involved.
“We believe internet freedom needs to become a plank of our foreign diplomacy and should be part of trade negotiations,” Davidson said.
That message was well-received, at least by the self-selected group of Washington lawmakers at the hearing.
Chairman Byron Dorgan, a Democratic senator from North Dakota, argued that China couldn’t reap the rewards of being a dominant player in the manufacture of goods, while placing unfair restrictions on the information industry.
“The truth is the world is made up of more than just products, there is also a marketplace of ideas in the world,” Dorgan said. “Respected countries don’t censor their citizens; respected countries don’t put their citizens in jail without trial, and respected countries don’t fear speech or ideas.”
It’s not clear whether pressure from foreign companies can change China’s censorship rules, as divestment in Apartheid South Africa did with racial policies.
But that’s certainly the hope of Google among others.
“We are hoping that we can offer our service uncensored in China,” Davidson said. “A bad case scenario is that others rush in to fill the void with products that don’t provide unfiltered information to Chinese users.”
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GoDaddy, the net’s largest domain-name registrar, announced Wednesday it would stop selling .cn domain names, saying it was unwilling to comply with new rules from the Chinese government that require new and existing .cn domain-name holders to provide photo ID.
Google has cleverly decided to get around Chinese Internet censors by routing all traffic through its 
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