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February 1, 2006

The Middle Kingdom And Internet Search

What China And Verizon Have In Common

Just a couple weeks after the good folks at Google dazzled the (adoring) press by refusing to comply with a U.S. government order to hand over their users' search history (unlike their weak-kneed rivals Yahoo! and MSN), Google this week (finally) managed to disappoint even their fanboy journos by agreeing to help the Chinese government to censor Internet access in China.

As all seven loyal readers are well aware, the Internet in China is a little screwy. That is, it isn't the same Internet you're playing with right now. Large parts of it are missing. The reason they're missing is that the Chinese government would prefer that its citizens don't see the entire Internet, since then they might get crazy ideas about "human rights" and "the rule of law." So the Chinese government makes sure that the pipes (high level metaphor here) that connect China to the rest of the Internet don't allow data from certain sources to make it into the Middle Kingdom. We're talking highly controversial sources like The BBC and ThatKidInTheCorner. The result is that if you're a big online provider and you want to do business in China, you need to play by the Party's rules (despite the fact that we all know that no one like parties with rules...).

For a juicy example of what this all means, run the following search for images of "Tiananmen" on google.com (regular Google). Then run the same search on google.cn (Chinese Google). Turns out you can taste the difference!

For the avoidance of doubt, Google isn't the only one who's decided to do as the Chinese government says. Yahoo turned over information that put a journalist in jail last year. And Microsoft pulled down a blog on MSN Spaces that, errr, offended the Chinese government's sensibilities. The defense that each of these companies uses (and it's a fair one) is that, as multinational corporations, they must respect the laws of the countries in which they do business. In the interest of PR in each of their homes, they puff their chests and add little conditions to their compliance that create the illusion of standing up to China. But the message is clear: as long as there are 1.3 billion potential customers in China, the web companies are going to play by the Chinese government's rules and edit the Internet as requested.

Of course, as they're complying, each of these companies (along with our government) is snickering about it. Sure, we'll help you censor the Internet, but you don't really think that you can keep this thing under control, do you? This is the Internet we're talking about -- it's kind of tricky, logistically, to censor the whole thing. You might be able to keep an eye on some big sites that draw a lot of traffic, but could you really keep an eye on every e-mail? Every IM? Is this actually sustainable?

You would think it wasn't -- just the scale of keeping track of the hundreds of billions of e-mails of hundreds of millions of people will be too onerous for anyone to handle. But it's not completely undoable, because, ultimately, China owns the pipes. That is, the Chinese government controls the infrastructure that transports data around the Middle Kingdom. And you could forsee a future where the Chinese Internet includes a mix of approved/ sanitized foreign sites as well as home-grown approved/ sanitized sites. Where all e-mail traffic must go through a democracy-quashing variant of corporate e-mail filters. Where Google, Yahoo, and MSN all have developed a completely separate set of content and services that exist mostly in China. And where, suddenly, China has its very own Internet -- one that's only partially connected to the Internet that the rest of the world uses. It sounds goofy, but with a couple hundred million users, you might actually establish your own little separate Internet ecosystem, and you might have enough users even within your borders to create significant enough network effects (the fancy term for the multiplicative value created by adding more and more participants to a network) to actually have a fake Internet that's worth something.

Though it may seem orthogonal, China building out its own Internet is very similar to what Verizon's trying to do right now with its VCast service. Just like China, Verizon owns its own pipes (a mobile telephony infrastructure) and would like to control what sort of information travels across their network. But Verizon is interested in a different sort of information; that is, all of it. And they're interested in a different sort of control; that is, they just want to charge you for all of it.

Essentially, what they're trying to do with this VCast thing is create their own proprietary network for exchanging information and entertainment media. You know, just like that Internet thing. Of course, this begs the question: why would we want the expensive fake limited Internet when we could have the actual Internet? The regular Internet is just fine, thank you. I'm not going to pay you extra for a lousier product. I bet you can't even steal music/ movies on VCast, much less access limitless amounts of pornography (two extremely popular things to do on the actual Internet)! I'll take the actual Internet, please.

The more pertinent difference, of course, is that China's building their own Internet to maintain the reign of the autocratic ruling party, and Verizon just wants to make money. They're both terrible ideas, but I can deal with Verizon's lousy idea -- it'll just fail. The Chinese one? Not so much. But I don't think it's Google's (or Yahoo!'s, or Cisco's, or Microsoft's) responsibility to take on the Chinese government on censorship, as some legislators would have us believe. If this is really so offensive, our government -- the ones we vote for specifically to represent us to other countries' governments -- should talk to the folks in China about it. Leave the goofy tech companies alone.*

*If we want the smart folks at these companies to worry about something in the national interest that could add at least as much value as accurate and relevant search results, we should try to get them fired up about solving our energy problems. That'd be nice.

Posted by thatkid at February 1, 2006 11:31 PM under The Papers

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