p2pnet.net News:- Google’s September 27 explanation as to why it in effect censors news from within mainland China by excluding certain sites doesn’t hold much water, says Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT) ceo Bill Xia.

DIT’s DynaWeb is a free proxy network built to circumvent internet blocking in China and Xia told p2pnet that on September 15, DynaWeb revealed Google’s news results for China were different than those conducted in the US.

“We were able to confirm this report through proxies in China,” he said.

Google spokeswoman Debbie Frost told p2pnet, “to create the best possible news search experience for our users, we sometimes decide not to include some sites, for a variety of reasons”.

Does ‘not include’ amount to ‘block’? And does ‘block’ amount to ‘censor’?

Google justifies the fact it ‘omits’ some sites in mainland China by saying:

“[…] it’s clear that search results deemed to be sensitive for political or other reasons are inaccessible within China. There is nothing Google can do about this,” and:

“We … considered the amount of information that would be omitted. In this case it is less than two percent of Chinese news sources. On balance we believe that having a service with links that work and omits a fractional number is better than having a service that is not available at all.”

Logic suggests the most sensitive sites would be the ones ‘omitted’. Otherwise, why bother?

“I would like to emphasize what those ‘results deemed to be sensitive for political or other reasons’ are,” says Xia.” They include the hiding of SARS information and persecution of Falun Gong, both well known to western countries.

“This is about truth or lies, about committing crime versus exposing crime,” declares Xia. “Omitting ‘two percent’ of sites is like omitting 100% of the truth. Because of the ‘Matrix’ nature of information control in China, showing the headlines is a significant breakthrough from showing ‘zero’ information.”

In an earlier interview, Xia said the Chinese government controls the media and the military through a ‘matrix’ that hides web sites relating to civil rights and opinions the Chinese authorities don’t want people to see, going on, “And of course, these are the only places people can find this find of ‘forbidden information’ and by excluding them, Google is actively helping the Chinese government to enhance its ‘Matrix’.

“This exercise is no different to Yahoo China’s exclusion of oversea sites when words such as ‘Falun Gong’ are searched.”

With the headlines available, Freegate will take care of the rest, he says. Freegate is the free DIT program which helps Chinese citizens beat website blocking. You can get a copy here.

Google founder Sergey Brin was recently interviewed by Playboy when, referring to site blocks and China, he said, “Sometimes the ‘Don’t be evil’ policy leads to many discussions about what exactly is evil.”

However, “This is ‘giving in to evil’ rather than ‘Don’t be evil’,” says Xia.

At the beginning of September, there were suggestions that the Chinese authorities were deliberately blocking Google - “the site was repeatedly inaccessible when tested by BBC News Online using a system developed by researchers at the Harvard Law School,” says a BBC report.

The Playboy interview is with “two unlikely billionaires” who “seem uninterested in the accoutrements of wealth. Both drive Priuses, Toyota’s hybrid gas-and-electric car”. The clear implication is Brin and Page are socially conscious and socially caring.

PLAYBOY: How did you respond when the Chinese government blocked Google because your search engine pointed to sites it forbade, including Falun Gong and pro-democracy websites?

BRIN: China actually shut us down a couple of times.

PLAYBOY: Did you negotiate with the Chinese government to unblock your site?

BRIN: No. There was enough popular demand in China for our services-information, commerce and so forth-that the government re-enabled us.

PLAYBOY: Have you ever agreed to conditions set by the Chinese government?

BRIN: No, and China never demanded such things. However, other search engines have established local presences there and, as a price of doing so, offer severely restricted information. We have no sales team in China. Regardless, many Chinese

Internet users rely on Google. To be fair to China, it never made any explicit demands regarding censoring material. That’s not to say I’m happy about the policies of other portals that have established a presence there.

PLAYBOY: Which sites cooperate with Chinese government censors?

BRIN: I’ve heard various things, but I don’t want to spread secondhand rumors. There is a Harvard site that lists what you can and can’t get from different places around the world.

PAGE: Search for “censorship” and “Berkman” and you can get the website. [Editor’s note: The website is at cyber.law.harvard.edu/home.] It has some cool programs that automatically track what is and isn’t available on the web.

PLAYBOY What would you do if you had to choose between compromising search results and being unavailable to millions of Chinese?

BRIN: There are difficult questions, difficult challenges. Sometimes the “Don’t be evil” policy leads to many discussions about what exactly is evil. One thing we know is that people can make better decisions with better information. Google is a useful tool in people’s lives. There are extreme cases, we’re told, when Google has saved people’s lives.

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mainland China - Google on China censorship, p2pnet, October 1, 2004

internet blocking - Google helps ‘China Matrix’, p2pnet, September 20, 2004

Playboy - Securities and Exchange Commission

Falun Gong - Can China’s Net censorship be beaten?, p2pnet, November 13, 2002

repeatedly inaccessible - China blocking Google, BBC News Online, September 2, 2004

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If you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent website blocking outside of China.

Download it here and feel free to copy the zip and host it yourself so others can download it.

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