How Google Could End Web Censorship In China In Two Easy Steps

Or at least how a small group of activists think that Google could end web censorship in China in two easy steps. There is something of a problem with the plan of course but we'll come to that later.

Here's what the plan is and it does indeed seem very simple:

1. Google needs to first switch its China search engine (google.com.hk) to https by default. It has already done this in the US, but not in China. This would essentially mean that Chinese netizens using Google would be taken to https://www.google.com.hk, the encrypted version of the search engine. The great firewall of China cannot selectively block search results on thousands of sensitive terms if the encrypted version is used.

2. While we provide a pretty comprehensive list of websites that are blocked in China, Google holds the best list of blocked websites, everywhere in the world. If the website that a user tries to visit is blocked, Google should redirect the user to a mirrored version of the same website hosted by Google.

That's it. Two simple steps and Google could end online censorship by the end of this month in China. Quite possibly they could end online censorship just about everywhere in the world before the new year. Forget about not doing evil – this would be something that we could all celebrate.

I'll leave it to better technical minds than mine to check whether this would actually work or not. My suspicion is that it's not quite that simple: a small group mirroring one or two sites might get away with it but I have a feeling that a major corporation flooding China with the entirety of the banned parts of the internet will find the authorities doing something or other to frustrate that attempt.

However, there's something rather more important than whether it would work or not in practice. And that something more important is are we really in favour of telling large corporations which laws they should obey and which ones they shouldn't? That really does seem to be opening a can of worms to me.

Agreed, China is not politically free (although it's probably one of the most economically free places on the planet at present) and I agree absolutely that Chinese citizens should be enjoying the same social and political freedoms that we do. However, it is also true that the current government of China is both the de jure and de facto legitimate government of that country. We might not like many of the laws that they impose upon the population (I certainly see those I think are foul) and it is indeed righteous that we should expend effort to encourage the country to open up.

However, that's very different indeed from encouraging a corporation to not obey the law of the land where it is trading. For once we've done that we remove that territorial application of law. And replace it with, well, we replace it with corporations doing whatever their executives think is just fine to do.

The Chinese attitude towards, say, workplace discrimination is rather different from that that prevails in the US. This is a plus point in favour of the US of course. But would we want a Chinese company to be able to say, well, that's not how we do it at home so that's not how we're going to do it in the US? This is the same thing isn't it? We're arguing that Google should apply American laws and or mores in China whatever Chinese law itself has to say about the subject?

Let's take an example much closer to the bone. Germany and Austria (and, I think, France) have laws against Holocaust denial. Also against the sale of any Nazi memorabilia. Yahoo certainly, and e-Bay I think, have been caught out by this: sales of such memorabilia in the US for example, where it is entirely legal. The Germans complained that these sales were visible in Germany and that this breached local law. Yahoo therefore had to make sure that the sale of these products could not be seen (or more importantly, taken part in) by those resident in Germany.

Or one that came up a couple of years ago while I was actually in Germany. Castle Wolfenstein gets a bit too close to that Nazi stuff for the Germans to want it to be downloadable in the country. I tried downloading it and indeed I could not.

Now, no, I am not equating laws against holocaust denial with Chinese laws on censorship. They are both censorship but the former is at least understandable from a public policy point of view even if I personally disagree with the law. The second is just oppression.

But it is still true that if we uphold Germany's right to make sure that Yahoo doesn't let people see sales of Nazi memorabilia then we've also got to uphold China's right to tell Google what it may or may not show in China. For they are both the de jure governments of those nations and we do indeed expect corporations to obey the laws of the nations in which they do business. We couldn't, in fact, have it any other way.

All of which is why even if those two changes are technically possible, would indeed sweep away Chinese censorship of the internet, it's still probably not a good idea to implement them. For we really wouldn't like a world in which corporations didn't have to obey the law.

Just to be absolutely clear: I am all in favour of Chinese censorship ending. But I'm not in favour of a corporation being allowed to decide which laws it feels that it wants to obey in which country.