{ texts for nothing }

Big news from Google:

In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. … [W]e have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. … [A]s part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. …

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. [my emphasis]

It would be naive to believe that Google is making this decision on purely ethical grounds, and we’ll have to wait and see to what extent they actually follow through on this. And I still have a long list of very serious objections to Google, not the least of which is that they have been collaborating with Chinese state censors for years. But I think they are doing the right thing here.

Best wishes to Google’s employees in China. Hopefully they won’t end up paying for their American bosses’ change of heart.

Future Now calls attention to a brief report in the January/February issue of Foreign Policy:

China censors the Internet effectively, and it appears to be exporting that expertise to other dictatorships. Beijing recently sent engineers trained in phone tapping to Zimbabwe. It also arranged to send computer equipment designed for filtering — or spying — on the Internet. In 2004, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s state-owned telecom, TelOne, made Internet service providers sign contracts allowing it to monitor and censor illegal material. The Chinese hardware could make this job much easier.

Future Now observes, “If you’re a dictator or president for life, why choose the completely open, dangerously destabilizing Western version of the Internet, when you could go with an Internet that lets you control the content your citizens see and observe what they do?”

Given current trends, I’m not so sure those of us in what used to be known as “the free world” will continue to enjoy the open and destabilizing version of the Internet either.

Just saw this post on Michael Geist’s blog:

Starting tomorrow, China’s Ministry of Information Industry plans to begin offering four country-code domains. In addition to the dot-cn country code domain, three new Chinese character domains are on the way: dot-China, dot-net, and dot-com. As the People’s Daily Online notes this “means Internet users don’t have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States.” In other words, the Chinese Internet becomes a reality tomorrow. With it, the rules of the game may change as 110 million Internet users will suddenly have access to a competing dot-com (albeit in a different character set) and will no longer rely exclusively on ICANN for the resolution of Internet domain name queries.

Geist also has some good context and analysis of what this means. (Andy Oram also wrote a good backgrounder on the issues last October.) It will be interesting to see how things develop.