Well, for those who doubted, here you have the proof. Get the solid worldwide reputation of Google Inc. for non-evilness, add an American president that enjoys public support in almost every corner of the World, and you can assemble a Megaton soft bomb with the power to break through all the conventions of international politics. That is exactly what Google’s actions represent today, and for the time being they are obtaining the expected support outside of China.

While at first some observers interpreted the Hong Kong move as a face saving one, I think after Brin’s appeal to Obama today there is little doubt that this was not the case. What is probably even worse from the CCP’s perspective is the direct link set up today on Google HK to Drummond’s blog post in Chinese. Up to now only a few Chinese activists had bothered to read the message, now every single Google.cn user is sent there. Google is attempting to speak directly to the people of China, bypassing the channels of the government, how is that for a detonator?
This is the kind of action that only a company like Google could risk, and only a government like Obama’s could support without lifting suspicions all around the World. It is a completely new approach to international politics where a company now is not only pushing for political goals, but even addressing peoples and governments directly as an equal. Any company in the World acting like this would get a severe rebuke from its own government, but I doubt that this will be the case for Google.

It does not work like this

I have been quite negative about Google’s actions ever since this “New Approach” started in January. Unlike other critics, I don’t doubt the sincerity of Google’s leaders or the goodness of their objective. On the contrary, I am convinced that this is a deliberate personal move by Google’s leaders to do their real significant bit while they are still in time, before they lose full control of the corporation. With the growth of Google this is bound to happen soon, and both Page and Brin have announced the sale of a good chunk of their shares this year.

But my reasons to be against Google’s plan are much more simple than that. It is just that I think it will not work.

I readily admit that I might be wrong, indeed I hope so, this is a completely new approach and nobody has all the certainty. But from my observation of China in the last few years, I can’t see how the plan might work. The government will try to avoid a scene, and it is possible that for a while Google will remain unblocked. But sooner or later the CCP is going to have them pay for this, the door has been left wide open for another call to patriotism, and the consequences will be bad for the Chinese and for the internet.

A problem of principles

In fact, even if the outcome turns out to be good, I am not comfortable with the principle of Google’s actions. It is a principle of moral superiority, the old story of Western people going to different continents and killing as many as they could to save them from the wrong faith. It is based on the boundless Western hypocrisy that allows us even today to commit some of the worst crimes in the World while proudly walking under the banner of human rights.

Granted, Google’s bomb is a soft one and it does not kill people, my parallel only goes so far. But if we look at the recent history of China, we will see that the Chinese today are far better off than they were at any other time of  the last century, including when the West had power over them. And surprisingly enough, whatever freedom and progress the Chinese have today was not achieved through ultimatums or moralizing stances. On the contrary, it was achieved by the patient work of millions of Chinese who sincerely care about their country.

And those people didn’t manage it alone, together with them there are also thousands of foreigners like me who have been working here for years, helping China develop its technologies, teaching English to the Chinese, dealing with the authorities and getting our hands “dirty” with things like the Olympics or the Expo. Events that the righteous minds in the West thought they should have never been given to the Chinese, because they don’t share our true faith.

I am convinced that this is the right way to develop China and the rest of the World, helping them out on the daily hard work, and avoiding righteous heroes that take us nowhere. And in spite of all the times I have had to swallow my pride and take what came from the Chinese authorities, when I speak with most of the Chinese around me I don’t see suffering and oppression, but hope in the future. That is the best sign that we are doing it right. Let’s be patient.

Like usual, most of the commentators our there got it all wrong. This is not about Google offering an open service to the Chinese from outside. If Google wanted to do that, they would quietly close down Google.cn and continue with their HK search site as they were already doing before. There is nothing new on this Google HK except the translation of the interface to simplified mandarin, a simple tweak that has little impact on usability for mainland netizens.

If Google really wanted the Chinese to enjoy free search, they could have tried to give some face to the Chinese government, instead of literally forcing it to retaliation.

But Google HK is obviously not a sustainable plan, it is just a gesture, an open challenge to the authority of the CCP. The redirection to this site and the welcoming message in simplified is clear enough in this respect: “welcome to the New page of Google search in China”. Take that, Beijing, we don’t give a damn what you say, anti-democratic freak.

One clarification in case someone gets me wrong: I have been one of the harshest critics of  Google when it collaborated with the Chinese censors, and I support any action that could lead the Chinese government to stop censoring the internet. The problem is, I don’t see Google’s actions are conductive to this result, but quite the opposite.

It is all in the form. Even if Google is right to stop censoring (and I think it is), you cannot deal with a country like they are dealing with China. Google leaders are trying to do their significant bit, but they know nothing of diplomacy and they have messed this one up from the beginning. International politics is not business, the stakes are much higher, and form is essential. In this field, righteous accusations and challenges normally lead nowhere but to more entrenched positions, and ultimately it is always the people that foots the bill.

So now that Google has made its best efforts to get all its services blocked, it looks very likely that it will succeed. The people of China will not be able to use Gmail or the promising GBuzz anymore. The voices within the CCP that struggle for more openness are left defenseless, and the internet will be even more divided than it was before. A bad move for business, bad for the Chinese, and bad for a free World Wide Web.

In many ways, that first Expo was very similar to the one China is doing now. Spain had to prove something,  it had passed its own 改革开放 (reform and opening) in the late 70s with the transition to democracy. Then it went on to  join the European Union in the 80s, and by 1992 it was finally starting to look like a developed country. The old pessimistic phrases “Spain is different” and “Europe starts behind the Pyrenees” felt already like something from the past.

Granted, the Reform here has “Chinese characteristics”, and massive population of China needs more time than Spain to complete the Development.  But overall, there is a clear parallelism between Spain 92 and China 2008-2010, and that is one of the reasons I am so excited about the Expo. It was great stuff in 92, and I have some cool memories of chunks of icebergs in the Chile pavilion, or an outdoor temperature control system that was unseen at the time.

In the case of Shanghai, not only the host will be doing its best to impress, but also the participant countries are facing the most promising tourism market in the World, and they have a strong incentive to come up with good shows. If the Canada pavilion is representative of the rest, their Cirque du Soleil should give you a good idea of the World class material we can expect.

I had an article published yesterday on Danwei, where I explain why I think the Expo is an event worthy of attention.  Since a large part of the readers of China blogs are American, the most expo-skeptic country, my effort is unlikely to be successful. Even among the Chinese, I see little enthusiasm at 40 days from the inauguration, but I think the commenter on Danwei hits the nail when he says these long duration events become more popular after the opening.

I will be writing more about the Expo and Shanghai, so stay tuned. On the MiniYouren I also do updates of interesting daily information on the Chinese press related to the Expo (subscribe via Google buzz or reader). Let me know if you have any suggestion of aspects you might want to read about.

Finally, I recommend the following sites for Expo-related information:

• • Shanghai Scrap
  • A Sorry Spectacle
  • Lost Laowai Blog
  • Official page of the EXPO
  • Shanghai Morning Post EXPO special

In fact, other than the deals with advertisers (the revenue-generating part of the business), there is little of Google.cn that is really in China. The data collected by Google.cn is a valuable asset for the company and it is kept in the US databanks, together with all the other Google countries indexes. Among other reasons, because Google.cn is nothing more than Google.com translated and censored for the Chinese.

This made me think of a possible outcome I hadn’t thought of before: that Google.cn may uncensor its content completely and continue to function normally served from the US, hosted under a different domain (since .cn extensions are controlled by China). From a practical point of view this wouldn’t make any big difference, as it would just be a copy of Google.com in simplified Chinese. But from a political and “face” perspective, it could be extremely damaging for Google relations with China, and probably lead to GFW of all Google services.

I sincerely hope this does not happen, and I hope that Google leaders will give due face to the Chinese government. One thing is to be consequent and decide to stop censoring content, a position that I respect. But a very different thing is to slam the door and slap the face of a government that is representing a whole country, whether we like it or not. That kind of arrogance would be completely unwarranted from any corporation, especially one with strong ties to a government that is not precisely an international model of respect of human rights.

I guess we’ll know the answer to this very soon. In the meantime, someone has an explanation for this “hosted in China” thing? I am puzzled, because Google.cn does behave like a site hosted in China (ie, no Reset Connection blocks), but unlike Baidu, the IP is outside. This is the only such case I have seen of outside IP not triggering RC terms, I guess it is part of  G’s deal with the government.

PS .For explanations on the technical stuff see the related posts below.

PSS. Another new thing on Google.cn that has been around for a few weeks is the advert that shows up once in a while on top of the searches: 小提示：”G.cn，值得信任” — 通过 G.cn 上谷歌. (announcement: you can trust G.cn–visit Google through G.cn). Ironic that this message has replaced the “censored results” notification that used to be on top of the search results.

And really, the sooner we close this the better. The media are getting bored of the wait, and they are filling it with a wave of horror stories about cyberwar, all of which may be hurting Google, hurting US-China relations, and generally insulting the intelligence of netizens.

There have been reports of all kinds regarding the cyberwars, from the crazy wingnut ones to the relatively relaxed. All follow in the line of a completely muddled Google message and subsequent speech by Hillary Clinton. This article by the the “liberal” Wapo was one of the first to come out, and right from the opening paragraph it sets the mood for all the other cyberwar press that followed.

THE INTERNET has produced a vast expansion of free speech and access to information around the world. But for China and Russia, it has also become a means for waging a covert war against other nations, including the United States — a brazen effort to steal secrets and plant malware. For those countries and for a host of other authoritarian regimes, Internet freedom is a threat, to be countered by censorship, the imprisonment of bloggers and domestic spying.

As I said from the beginning, we are mixing at least 3 completely different issues, each of them caused (if at all) by different persons, and bundling it all together into the ready made Washington formula of the war for Democracy and Freedom. Let’s see the main points in the article:

“Waging a covert war”

I will pass over the obvious objection that is never too clear in Washington: war kills people, the internet does not. More crucially, there is one side missing to this war, at least until it is proven that China was attacking Americans on the internet.

But who in the People’s Liberation Army are conducting this hi-tech war, the same geniuses that were unable to put together a decent Green Dam filtering software? Or battalions of programmers from Chinese universities, all very disciplined and loyal to the army like talented hackers are known to be? There is something here that doesn’t fit.

Still, the  best question has to be how exactly is China supposed to attack America. Some think tanks have a very clear answer to this: by launching a shockwave that will collapses the USA’s core IT systems. That is, the same systems where China has 2+ trillion dollars in reserves. Right.

“Steal secrets”

The issue here is not related to the military. China is a country extremely hungry for technology and with little culture of intellectual property. The problem of Data Security in China predates the internet and it is very well known to companies working here. Those of us dealing with sensitive technologies work with strict procedures to ensure all IP is contained within the project team, and even so there are leaks.

But is the risk coming from independent hackers or from the Chinese government? Nobody usually asks this question, because it is difficult to prove, and quite simply we don’t care: as long as there is someone ready to pay big bucks for your techology, there will be motivated hackers/spies to go for it. Our job is to protect the information of our clients; the Western governments’ job is to put pressure on China to act more strictly against these kind of behaviours.

Similarly, the first duty of Google is to protect the information of their users. According to their own blog post, Google have failed to guard securely this information, or even their own company’s IP. But instead of admitting failure frankly, they chose to play the political game and write sweeping and unproven accusations to a government.

“Censorship, Imprisonment of bloggers and domestic spying”

Of all the accusations making the headlines, these are the only ones for which there is solid evidence against the Chinese government. All of us who watch the Chinese internet have seen and read about these issues before. But these points, while disgusting and worthy of condemnation, have nothing to do with an attack on America or any other country, nor are they specifically online problems.

Regarding censorship, we all know that Google has been a main partner of the Chinese government for the last 5 years and continues to do it today, so there is little to say for them until something changes in G.cn.

Regarding the imprisonment and domestic spying: the Chinese government has used the same holes that Google leaves open for US  authorities to spy and imprison people without trial in the name of American security. In other words, China is doing exactly the same as the USA already does, except that it lacks the democracy and soft power, the Googles and the Hillaries, to market it nicely to the World.

The Internet is Changing?

Perhaps it is because Obama’s abilities as a speaker have enchanted the netizenry after the Bush era. Or it may be just that the internet is not so young anymore and it is quickly becoming mature. The point is that I see a degree of conformism in the Western internet that is scary. Led by a Google corporation now expert in lobbying, we are all quite happy to ingest the old soup that the Washington establishment is cooking up for us.

And it is much the same sticky soup that we have been eating offline for ages, now taken to the web. The ingredients are: big ideals like Freedom and Democracy, the own interests of US foreign policy, and the supposed priorities of “American Security”, all well passed with the blender and served with a dose of Kool Aid to cover the taste of gunpowder.

It would be silly to accuse Clinton or the Wapo of this. They are the Washington establishment and they are doing their job admirably well: defending American interests and pushing for American foreign policy goals. But what is not so obvious is that Google should be part of that game, or that the World’s netizens will continue to follow and trust Google blindly once they understand that its allegiance is to a certain country rather than to recognized universal principles.

Google’s risky bet

This is something many Americans don’t realize, but the support that Google gets in other countries is something quite unique for an American corporation. I have found myself in discussions with French and Chinese people who defended Google passionately and jumped at my throat when I mentioned “monopoly” or “the new Microsoft”. International revenues of Google are already larger than Google US, but Google’s main business, the search engine, has weak network effects. This means that unlike services like Windows or Facebook, Google needs to continuously cultivate goodwill to keep the people clicking on its sites and trusting its cloud.

By openly siding with the US government, Google is betting that the collaboration with the NSA and American defense will make its cloud look more secure to the World’s users. While Obama is there representing America this might probably work, but it is a very risky approach, and in places like Europe or Asia it can easily backfire. Sooner or later the time will come when the US shows its less amiable face, and then will all those people still be happy to put their lives in the hands of the NSA?

Another question: isn’t Data Security a core business that Google should develop internally, instead of handing it over to government agencies?

Disclosure:

My own site has been de-indexed not indexed by Google for almost three months, and two consecutive processes of reconsideration have changed nothing. Probably This is not due to the what I write, but to a previously existing (long solved) problem of duplicate content. In any case, the banning disappearing of this site from the Google search has taken away 40% of my readers and a larger portion of new followers. While I try not to let this influence my opinion of Google, the whole thing has been an enlightening experience. You need to run a website and get it banned by disappear from G to feel the power of the beast company in your own skin. I just wish this tool never falls into the wrong hands.

UPDATE: Whatever I might say of Google at a political level, I have to state clearly that it is an amazing company. How many times have you seen that you complain about a service on your blog and the customer support people come over to comment and help you out?  I solved the problem yesterday and in fact it had nothing to do with Google  (more details in the webmaster link in comments).  I apologize for even slightly implying that Google might be banning my content, and cheers to John Mueller for his help.

NOTE: For those readers who’ve been offline for the past 3 days, this is a post about Google Buzz, the new Google service that has invaded the World’s mailboxes this week.

But take it easy, hold on a sec, don’t rush to your GFW test tools, this has not happened yet. I just want to be the first to announce it and get all the credit, since I am 90% certain that Google Buzz will be blocked within a week. The remaining 10% I am hedging in case the GFW censors get too high on Baiju over the New Years and their reactions are a bit slower than expected.

Look, I hate playing blogger of doom, but this is just how China works today. I’ve heard a few opposed opinions from bloggers I respect, and I am ascribing that to wishful thinking. There is no way Google Buzz is going to continue open, here is why:

• Gbuzz is attracting very fast a larger number of users than Twitter or Facebook in China, due to its use of Gmail, a relatively popular email service here.

• The viral transmission potential of Google Buzz is extraordinary, and very appealing for the Chinese way of using the internet. In the first 24 hours of GBuzz in China the popular Chinese bloggers where getting far more comments than pioneers like Robert Scoble.

• After their recent controversy with the Chinese authorities, Google put Gmail (and now GBuzz) on HTTPS, which means that the GFW cannot  see the content flowing inside China. They cannot block particular users or keywords, and neither can they force a self-censorship of Google as they did with the Google.cn, for reasons both technical and political for the Google company.

So what we have here is a means of massive viral communication, completely out of control and with a potential to piss off the Chinese authorities that may be second only to the Epoch Times.

A Real-time Simulation

For those who still don’t agree with me, I have used my old engineering supercomputer to do a real-time simulation of the upcoming events, starting from yesterday, when most Chinese Gmail users got access to GBuzz. The first 4 steps have already happened as of February 12:

Step1: GBuzz is rolled out in China and within hours the popular bloggers are getting streams of comments in the few hundreds. One of the first subjects of discussion is whether the Buzz will be blocked or not.

Step2: Some Chinese users start timidly testing the system with unmodified swearwords and taboos, such as Caonima and Malagebi. Euphoria: no comments are deleted or blocked!

Step3: - After 12h some Chinese users are already sending pictures of beautiful ladies with a peculiar tendency to wear less and less clothes even as the winter is hitting back hard on the mainland.

Step 4: Bloggers like Han Han or AiWeiwei discover GBuzz and start broadcasting there. Not only their posts, but worst still, the flow of comments is out of reach of the Chinese authorities. Comment threads are by now in the tens of thousands.

Step 5: The next big viral event hits the Chinese internet, and seeing that all comments get erased on the other blogs and microblogs, even more people starts flocking to GBuzz.

Step 6: By now most netizens have understood that GBuzz is their GFW free day out. Uncensored photos of Edison Chen or drunken party cadres recirculate widely, people even write appraisals of the performances. More than 50% of the words on GBuzz worldwide are in mandarin characters, and about 10% of them are some form of 妈/逼 word construction (mother /cunt).

Step 7: The early days of FOS were rather hectic, but the people finally realizes the advantages of communicating freely. The divide between the Chinese internet and the rest of the world is disappearing quickly, and Google Buzz has written a page in World history.

… in the meantime, somewhere in the middle kingdom…

… the evil 5Mao teams of netizens sold to the the party have caught up with GBuzz and are calling their bosses in the propaganda department to wake up from their baijiu dreams and show up at the GFW headquarters with red tape and pruning shears…

Conclusion

OK, I think you get the gist by now. And the conclusion is this: there is no way GBuzz is going to remain open in China. The only question remaining to answer is what will happen to the rest of the Google services, in particular Gmail and Google.com (G.cn is already doomed in my books).

I see here 2 possibilities:

1- Google Buzz could technically be blocked without blocking GMail, in spite of their integration. The GFW could achieve this by using intelligent URL blocks on the #buzz string that appears on all the buzz URLs. Easier still, since they are in negotiation with Google, they could ask G to facilitate the blocking of GBuzz in exchange for GMail remaining open.

2- GBuzz might go down and take down with it all the Google services in China once and for all. Especially this can be true if the negotiations between Google and the Chinese government are not as smooth as I supposed lately. This has happened already in Iran, and I am certain most leaders in the CCP wouldn’t even  blink. Or does anyone think they care about the outside opinion on China’s freedom of speech?

So this is only a 2-way dilemma, I don’t see any other solution. The final outcome of the Google vs. China affair is coming very soon, precipitated by the unexpected birth of GBuzz. Neither Google nor the CCP can afford to wait much longer, as the pressure is mounting on both sides. The end is near, fasten your belts and turn on your VPNs.

And Happy New Year of the Tiger

And now I am going to close the computer, leave the office and take a flight to a certain tropical destination in South East Asia where I intend to spend my New Year’s Holidays. When I am back to Shanghai on the 22nd, Google Buzz will be over in China, and I will be just in time to pick up the pieces. I look forward to a whole new series of posts on the year of the Tiger.

Happy New Year to all, 恭喜发财！

Something is moving in Google China.

I have been working for the last 12 hours with Google docs, and I just realize I was using Yi’s computer, the one that doesn’t have the VPN installed. This means that Google Documents is unblocked since  yesterday evening at least.  And so is Google Groups! Both sites were blocked by the Chinese GFW until recently.

Now I don’t know what to make of this. Is the GFW tinkering with the censorship algorithms as it prepares to include the whole of Google.com in the block and turn off the lights for ever? Or are the negotiations in Beijing going fine, like we were wishfully trying to guess this week from the mini-Youren updates?

For the moment my tests of Google.cn and Google.com show no difference from censorship as usual. More about this coming soon, plus a recap of the situation in advance of possible changes. Stay tuned.

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• You can click on the title of the news item to go directly to that article.
• You can click on the Follow button to see my profile and subscribe.
• You can Reply to any of my notes right here in this page.

There is one annoying thing with GReader sharing system: you still can’t reply directly to a note. That is why I have opened this page. Just copy the note you are replying to in your comment below, or continue an existing thread. If it gets interesting enough I will open a separate post and put it in the front page.

Any other suggestion about this new service is more than welcome!
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But let’s leave our bipolar guesswork aside for a while, so we can concentrate on a more interesting issue. Namely, that it’s great that Google.cn is going to disappear, and that whatever happens to the rest of the Gs, the Chinese internet will be a better place when Google.cn is gone. Let’s start with some crude survey work:

Baidu, Google.cn or Google.com?

I improvised a little survey today in the office, where I asked three of my young Shanghai colleagues which search engines they like to use. Interestingly, the answers were very similar, and all included some form of the following statements:

• Baidu.com is better for local information and Chinese culture.
• Google.cn we use sometimes for international information.
• Google.com? Nah, that’s for foreigners.

These results are surprising, because as we saw yesterday, Google.com and Google.cn are exactly the same engine.  It doesn’t make any sense to search on Google.cn, where anything as innocent as 胡锦涛 (HuJintao) is obviously SEM manipulated. For the first experiment of the day we can see how, using this slightly conflictive term, results start to differ between G.com and G.cn. Try the links, see where there’s a Wikipedia article missing?

But the best of all is the answer given by the sample colleagues when I insist on why they use Google.cn: Oh well, the browsers here  direct you to Google.cn by default. That is probably the main reason why G.cn is ranked 3rd on Alexa for China, while G.com is only ranked 6th.

Hey, wait a second. Are you telling me that all it takes to get an identical, non SEM-ed Google Search in China is to type a “.com”, and 300 million netizens haven’t noticed in the last 4 years? Well, yeah. Kind of. Let me introduce you to:

The Chinese censorship and its peculiar victims

This is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Chinese censorship in the West. I realized this with the crazy Wang post, the one that was linked in an article 3 days straight on the Most Read list of the New York Times. I got lots of hits, and also lots of mail from creative Americans proposing ideas to help “free the Chinese” from the claws of the GFW.

But listen, the sad reality is, the CCP’s systems of censorship are so effective not because they are diabolically sophisticated, but because… because the Chinese netizens can’t give a damn if they are being censored by their government or not.

You don’t believe me? Then perhaps you have a better theory to explain why nobody uses the widely available, free web proxies to surf the internet. Or why the majority of Chinese netizens still use Google.cn when they have an identical search engine that is not manipulated on Google.com

Shocking, right? But not so much. The truth is that, in spite of popular funny memes and the occasional juvenile rant, the majority of Chinese who are rich enough to use the internet are happy with the status quo. They do find it mildly annoying to be treated like children by the CCP, but as long as the bills are paid, they don’t think so much of it.

And this is also why, if someone wants to create a device against the GFW, the user activated systems like proxies or Tor are not effective, because people simply don’t use them. The idea of a Server Side Proxy, or the Unblockable Host that would unblock a site WITHOUT action by the end user, was discussed here, and I concluded it was not feasible.

This is also the reason why initiatives like Chrter 08 never make it in China: it is not about users trying to get access to dissident sites, it is about dissidents unable to market their ideas to a general population that is unreceptive.

Advanced SEM for Dummies (Search Engine Manipulation)

The most amusing thing in the Google crisis is all the commentators crying about the loss of Google.cn and its negative consequences for the freedom of the Chinese. In fact, I maintain that Google.cn is the most evil product to ever have existed in the Chinese internet, and the World will be a better place without it.

That is because, unlike the Chinese official sites that practice censorship, what the search engines do is manipulation. Why? Because Google.cn is not a content site in itself, it is a gateway to the internet. When people type in a keyword into the search field, they are actually trusting it to return a fair picture of what is on the net.

When you type a “sensitive” term and G.cn removes all the results except the People’s Daily and Xinhua, Google’s responsibility is double: not only it supports those often objectible views on the first page, but it also implicitly states that it is the ONLY opinion existing in the World.

And the worse is, the Chinese who believed that would be right to do so, because Google’s well known principles clearly specify their commitment to give all the information available  in a democratic way. The little warning message that is displayed on Google.cn SEM searches is meant to avoid this situation, but it is tiny and often placed right at the bottom of the page, so most Chinese users just ignore it.

In the case of Google.cn, SEM is not about “good” or “evil”. It is about breaking the very principles that give a sense to the Google company, and it is understandable that Google has never been comfortable with it.

All tests in Chinese, English spelling is on purpose. The anomaly in the chinayouren string proves that in some rare cases G.cn does give better results that G.com, as SEM does not apply to petty disharmony.

Google.com and the GFW URL/IP blocks

One clarification is necessary here: when we say Google.com is free of SEM, it doesn’t mean that it is entirely uncensored. Google.com is hosted outside China, so it suffers from GFW blocks, in particular URL string blocks, like all the sites hosted out of the mainland. A funny way to test this block is to introduce the string  “chinayouren.com/eng” in any site search like Wikipedia, Yahoo, etc hosted out of China. The RC block is guaranteed! (fortunately I have changed my URL since and I  managed to unblock my blog).

A less funny example is when you search things like FLG, the famous religion fiercely opposed to the CCP. Google passes the characters of FLG to the URL, and this triggers the RC. And here is where we see the evil of Google.cn compared to Google.com:

• Google.com gives a very disruptive RC,  unmistakable sign of GFW block. This is plain censorship. Try here.
• Google.cn gives results from People’s Daily and Xinhua, the second of which starts: “FLG: the evil nature of the bloody…”. This is SEM manipulation. Try here.

Add to this that, for obvious practical reasons, the Chinese government cannot RC block too many common terms, or it would make the internet unusable. There are far less terms RC’ed on Google.com than terms SEM-ed on Google.cn, which is the reason why it is fairly easy, using Google.com in China, to get to very explicit material about Tiananmen 89 and many other delicate subjects. And even when those sites often are blocked themselves, the user who has seen the excerpts and thumbnails in the search results and then obtained an RC when clicking on them should be enlightened.

In conclusion, Google.com is a Search Engine that is:

1- Exactly as good quality as Google.cn (identical index)
2- Without the manipulation of Google.cn
3- AND much less censored than Google.cn

And the only reason why Chinese don’t use it is that Google.cn sounds more Chinese to them, and they just don’t care enough. Most probably the disappearance of G.cn will push the present G.cn users to switch to G.com, and the outcome will be increased freedom in the Chinese internet.

Conclusion

It is obvious that, if Google manages to keep Google.com and eliminate Google.cn, and in the process convince the CCP that it has already suffered the deserved punishment (for Google it DOES matter to lose G.cn, it is a source of revenue) then all will have ended well. That was probably not the initial intention of Google’s move, but it is a possible outcome.

On the other hand, some commenters are already saying that I am too optimistic, and that the CCP will quickly come to the same conclusion I have come and block Google.com. The good news is that EVEN if they do block Google.com, the situation may still be better than today. The Chinese Google users will start to miss the G, and they will start to use web proxies to access Google.com, expanding their use and making the Chinese net population more conscious of the GFW and of the ways to cross it.

And I think with this I have said all I had to say about Google and China. I am planning to write about other things for a while, at least until important, first hand news come out. In the meantime, you can ask questions or raise objections in the comments below, and I will try to help.

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*NOTES AND CLARIFICATIONS:

1- If you are outside mainland China probably the experiments will not work, because Google.com is tailored to your own country. There are web proxies hosted in the mainland that you can use to trick Google into thinking you are in China. I don’t remember any now, if anyone knows please comment below.

2- People have asked me about Bing and Yahoo’s SEM policies. A very quick test shows that in principle Yahoo.cn/com is similar to G.cn /.com, while Bing only has one version here, and it looks SEMed, but I’m not sure. In any case those sites are way behind Google in China.

3- Many tech-savvy Chinese obviously DO know that Google.com is not SEM manipulated. And no, I am not implying here that most Chinese are stupid. I am just saying that most of them don’t give a damn if they search for Hu Jintao and the only answer they get is the People’s Daily bio. There is just no notion of the advantages of diversity of information, something that the CCP is not very good at promoting.

Yesterday I imagined a worst case scenario where Google let ugly international politics get mixed into this affair. That was just a scenario of doom, and not the outcome I consider most likely. In fact, I believe the G leaders are more intelligent than all that, and today I want to offer my personal, optimistic prediction. And to round it up, we will go back to the basics for a little study of Search Engine Manipulation, an essential and often ignored concept.

My prediction

I was glad to hear today that Google wants to retain its operations in China, and that it is “ready to shut down its local search engine Google.cn unless it is allowed to run it uncensored”.

The key info here is “shut down its local search engine”. This would mean that Google is not going to force the situation anymore. Because the best way to piss off the CCP today would be to suddenly uncensor Google.cn without notice, and have the Propaganda Department issue an official note to close the servers. The document would be in all the headlines, and that would represent  an unmistakeable challenge to the CCP’s authority.

But as it stands today, regardless of the old “face” arguments that some commentators have written, I don’t think the situation is critical. The CCP is not particularly happy to see Google leave, and if Google keeps its blogging enthusiasm under control, there is no reason why they will not be lenient. For all the bad points I noted in Google’s initial post, it has the great advantage of being ambiguous. Most Chinese people haven’t read the text, and the CCP can ignore the ultimatum implied and ascribe it to bad Laowai manners, a la emperor Qing.

I am predicting that if Google comes back to reason and avoids big game politics in the coming weeks, in exhange for that the Chinese government will let them get away with the rest.  Well, probably Google will encounter some administrative trouble in their business, their Android plans might take ages to get approved, because the CCP needs to give a lesson to other audacious companies in the future.

But that is a problem of Google and its shareholders. What really matters to us is the freedom and openness of the Chinese internet, and here is the big news of the day: if Google.cn closes and Google.com remains, the Chinese internet will be MORE FREE THAN IT IS TODAY! You don’t believe me? Keep reading to find out why.

Google.com and Google.cn

One interesting thing of the Google search engines that is not very well understood is the difference between the different country sites: Google.com, Google.cn, Google.co.uk, etc. People don’t understand this simply because Google does not explain it in the instructions, and because it has changed over time.

But it is very easy to do some tests and compare the search results to come to this conclusion: what really matters is not the extension of the search engine, but your actual location. The simple reality is that, for Chinese non-SEM search terms (more below), the results in China for Google.com and Google.cn are exactly IDENTICAL. They have the same results in the same order, differing only in the sponsored ads.

If you are in China you can try this by looking up neutral terms like 上海浦东 or 鞋子. Google.com and Google.cn share indeed a single index, and the only difference between them is SEM, or the Manipulation of Search Engine results artificially done by Google in its Google.cn search engine. For various reasons that we will see below, this SEM is the shame of Google and the curse of the Chinese internet. Not only China, but Google Inc. and the whole World is much better off without Google.cn.

This means that, if Google operates smoothly and succeeds to retain in China its PR&D operations, it is very possible that in exchange the CCP will allow them to keep Google.com unblocked (GFW). Then the Chinese netizens, free of the scourge of Google.cn, will click on Google.com, and automatically be free of the brainwashing effects of Google.cn.

Search Engine Manipulation (Introduction)

I know athe conslusions above might sound a bit strange, and there are clearly a few objections that you can make. Namely, that URL and IP blocks still affect the sites you find on Google.com, producing the beautiful Reset Connections (RC) that we are so used to. But there are very important reasons to prefer the Google.com way to the Google.cn way. I need to get some sleep, but stay tuned and tomorrow I will give you the explanation and some nice pictures as evidence.

In the meantime, re-read last year’s study on SEM, RC and all the other creatures. And to start heating up, I leave you with this nice picture of what a Google.com search gives in China, without VPN or proxy or any other special device. This has remained exactly the same in the two years I have been monitoring. There is no real technical reason why Google does not apply SEM here, it must have negotiated with the government when they first came to China, and the CCP must have bought that all Chinese would go to Google.cn.

This time I have done the search in English so anyone can try it. Note the conspicuous results including bloody photos, the youtube video of the tank man, mentions of massacre and Charter 08, and also the remarkable 3rd position of our well pageranked friend Peking Duck.  The FLGs own Epch times comes right below, but it was left out of my screen capture. You can see it yourself at home searching tiananmen 89.

CORRECTION: Error in the original text, where I wrote SARFT I actually meant “Propaganda Department”.  Fortunately I noticed my slip before any commenter called me an idiot. It is corrected. More coming later today.

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I do not like the way it has been done, but it sure takes some guts for a CEO to defy the World order, whatever the company’s IPO said. My own site has been victim of censorship, and I was quick to blame Google when they helped censor initiatives like Charter 08,  so it is only fair that I praise them now. Search Engine Manipulation (SEM) is the worst kind of censorship, because it leads the user to believe that the information contained in search results is a fair sample of the World’s views. It was very difficult for Google to justify that behaviour, and it is good news that they stop being part of it. Bravo.

And yet, there are important reasons why Google has been putting up with the Chinese system for 4 years, and as far as I can see, all of those reasons are still there today. By leaving China on a whim, Google sends the message that all that work was just a big mistake. Worse still, by slamming the door on the way out, Google creates trouble for itself, for the Chinese netizens, and for the World internet community.

By any standard, Google’s statement last week is a disaster. It has all the sins that a company announcement can have, not only from the PR perspective, but also from plain common sense. It is insultingly self-righteous, it fails to provide a clear reason for the decision, and it does not offer evidence for any of the accusations. Worse still, it sends an ultimatum to the government of China, revealing a thirst of political power that is very disturbing in a corporation.

Brazen cartoon on China Daily (WSJ)

The primary colors in Google’s logo and its simple slogan “don’t be evil” suggest a world of fairy tales where Good and Evil are clearly defined, and one can live following the Google path, righteously pointing out to others that they are in the wrong. Life is unfortunately more complex, and only very simple people can believe that God is always on their side.

Intentions and Nature of Google

I liked yesterday’s article by Rebecca Mackinnon because it rejected the idiotic debate about the purity of motive of Google’s leaders. On the other hand, I found it a bit too optimistic regarding the role of Google and the World internet community today. 

Google is no more or less evil than most corporations. The difference is it has a developed a unique business model that requires large amounts of trust and goodwill, and it has done a great job of promoting it up to now. To the point that in the online community, it has managed to reverse the classic roles, turning the radical hacktivists into CEO-huggers.

But non-evilness is not what has taken Google so far. The secret of Google, its key asset is information. Google is cool because it is in the process of hoarding and classifying all the information of the World, and this allows it to earn money in a way that is not painful to the final user. Google today stands for great,  free inventions and open systems because its clever business model, impossible to replicate in other fields, allows it to earn money this way.

But Google today is still a very young company, and more vulnerable than most netizens imagine. It is extremely strong in brand and in goodwill, which is reflected in is market value. But this value is nothing more than a promise, and its actual revenues, extremely dependent on the Search engine business, are still far from the giants in the offline World.

Every internet company is always one click away from ruin, but this is especially true for a business based on search engine ad revenue. Facebook, Twitter, Windows, most information companies count on the network effect to force people to stay with them, Google just counts on a technological gap that is closing. For Google search, the competition is always at the reach of one finger, and until Google succeeds in establishing its network of cloud services, a large part of its value still relies on goodwill.

Google’s Mistake

As I said above, Google’s decision to stop collaborating with the censors is admirable, but to engage in brinkmanship with a country is a disastrous mistake. Google enters a new and risky game, with players far more powerful than itself, where it has more to lose than to win. If it doesn’t tone down its message very quickly, it risks being completely banned from China, which is a very different thing from just closing Google.cn.

First of all, this would mean that it abandons the activists that it supposedly cares about, and that Google.com, the only non-manipulated search engine popular in China, will most likely be blocked. Worse still, it means that Google of all companies, the one that is proposing to keep in storage all the data of our lives, admits to being defeated by the Chinese in the business of IP protection.

From the market perspective, it is even worse. The Chinese language might make up more than one third of the whole internet in this decade, and whatever Google’s share is today, disappearing from China will have immense consequences in the future online scene. Not only it increases the dangerous divide of the internets we already mentioned, but it effectively destroys any chance of Google becoming a truly universal company.

But for Google itself, there is one thing more dangerous than all that.

Non Evil vs Politics

The motto “don’t do evil” is negative, it suggests non alignment, passive resistance to the invaders, benevolence and pacifism. It would have been much better for Google to simply stop censoring some information, critical content like the Charter 08 and its imprisoned author, while trying to content the CCP by hiding boobs and ankles. They might have still been sent out of the country, but it would have been for a good cause, and the World would have been watching.

On the contrary, by openly challenging the government of China, the onus of proof lies now entirely on Google’s shoulders. And by letting itself be seen hand in hand with the US government, Google is taking sides in World politics. The neutral, non-aligned company that was meant to become the government of the internet suddenly becomes an American corporation. How will the non-American internet see this?

A company that speaks up against some evils will be expected to fight others as well, people will start asking Google to speak against certain American policies in the Middle East, or to leave the country if it is in disagreement with the Patriot Act.  The voice will turn that Google is at the service of the USA, and for a big part of the World, including many in the West, Google will forever be marked with the stink of politics.  It will still be a good company, certainly, like the CNN. But it will just not be the company anymore.

As it is today, the Chinese government is not particularly interested in seeing Google leave, so it will not push things further. If Google.cn manages to be sent out quietly and not make too big a mess of it, the situation may still end up favourably for them…

Please, Google, do not lend your name to a new American crusade. The offline World has had enough of imported freedom and democracy bombs, we don’t need the same on the internet. Democracy, like love,  has to come from the inside, it is achieved with patience and daily work, like you have been doing these four years. Stay at your post, keep working for China and for all of us, don’t let the internet be divided. And the online World will be yours.

This is going to make more noise now than it would normally, as people will be quick to find connections with the Google China affair and the hacker attack on Baidu. Both are unlikely to have any relation with Li’s decision. The crisis in Baidu was cooking long before any of those things happened, and Iranian cyber-attacks are pretty common these days.

But all that is normal. The shocking bit is that 6 days ago, long before any news had come out, one of the commenters on this blog told us something was going to happen to Baidu’s CTO. Am I in contact with higher beings? Of the internet or of the other kind? I don’t know, but I will try to pay more attention to mysterious comments in the future.

Regarding the Google affair, if anything, this crisis in Baidu makes Google’s move even more untimely, as they might have taken advantage of the situation now to catch up a bit on Baidu’s market share. In case there is still some doubt about my position re the Google affair, I am currently writing a post with title “Google: Don’t make that Mistake”. It will be on today if I don’t fall asleep before.