Matt Jones's List: Google censorship

• [FACT comments: While we’d like to believe that do-no-evil Google would treat Thai ’net censors with the same respect they’ve treated Chinese, the fact remains, Google is still censoring search results in China abd using geolocational blocking in many countries on YouTube. Gives us little to hope for here!]

   
   

  Who’s next?

   
   
  • Bangkok Post Database: February 24, 2010
   
  • http://www.bangkokpost.com/tech/techscoop/33452/who-next
   
   

  Is Thailand next? Google said it will stop censoring for the Chinese government Real Soon Now, and last week told the Australian Censor Board to pound sand when the Ozzies asked Google to please censor YouTube videos from their “refused classification” bin; pretty much under the radar, Google has been happy to censor on behalf of the Thai government as well, since a previous administration cut off access to YouTube over a royal insult.

• Last week, an Italian magistrate convicted three Google executives for violating Italian privacy laws for a video uploaded in late 2006 to Google Video, which showed a disabled child being bullied by other schoolchildren in Turin. Each got suspended sentences of six months in jail. This is the first case worldwide to hold the company's executives criminally responsible for the content posted on its system. Vivi Down, an Italian group representing people with Down syndrome, and the boy's father in Milan pushed for a criminal prosecution against four individual Google employees (one of them was charged only with the dismissed defamation charges).

   
• Last week, an Italian magistrate convicted three Google executives for violating Italian privacy laws for a video uploaded in late 2006 to Google Video, which showed a disabled child being bullied by other schoolchildren in Turin. Each
• The court dismissed the allegation of criminal defamation but upheld a charge of illegally handling personal data, deciding that under EU stringent data protection law, replicated in the Italian legislation, Google needed prior authority before distributing that personal data. In other words, any ISP or Net intermediary working within Italy is now co-responsible for the legality of content containing “personal data” (video, text, audio or other data) before anyone has complained about the content. Google has been considered a media company (that is, a content provider, a publisher), and therefore responsible for any content it publishes. Rather, the common opinion and practice on the Internet  (as pointed out also by Google itself) is that Google is simply a form of Internet service provider, and as such not directly responsible for material it hosts — a distinction crucial to the Italian decision. Also, the ruling seems to contradict a same EU directive on electronic commerce that gives service providers safe harbor from liability for the content they host.
• Prosecutors said Google waited to remove the video until after complaints to the police by Vivi Down, whose name was mentioned by the boys in the video. The video was recorded in May 2006 and uploaded on September 8 by the same students involved, since then identified thanks to that video and sentenced in December 2007 to 10 months of community work and probation. The video remained online for about two months, when — as shown by actual email-records (in Italian) — at 5:20 pm on November 6, 2006, an Italian user alerted for the first time the Google staff about that questionable material. The video was ultimately removed about 24 hours later, after a quick e-mail consultation with the company headquarters in Mountain View, California, and two hours after they received a formal complaint from the Italian police, also alerted by the Vivi Down association.

• The vast majority of Italian online sources and bloggers were furious, talking about a «heavy attack against Net freedom and ISP neutrality», while most media commentators openly supported the Google position that this sentence is imposing a “preventive censorship role” to Internet providers. Marco Pancini, Google Italia Policy Counsel, said: «We are deeply disturbed by such decision. Our executives had nothing to do with that video. And the judges are questioning the same basic principles upon which the Internet was built.» Others pointed out that now Italy is closer to the Chinese stump on freedom of expression.

   

  The court has 90 days to make public the sentence motivations and an appeal has already been announced by Google lawyers: many legal experts believe that the sentence will eventually be reversed or overturned.

3 more annotations...

• Google created some major spin, some wow-factor. What is especially striking is that a huge corporation would commit itself to embarking on a campaign of civil disobedience, of speaking truth to power.
• Google’s actual announcement, through chief legal officer David Drummond, was that it would “phase out” its search censorship in China. Now, we really don’t know how that might be possible—you either censor or you don’t.

• Since FACT’s inception in 2006, through Thailand’s military coup’s seven-month YouTube block up to the present day, Google has failed to be responsive to FACT’s concerns over Google’s censorship in Thailand. FACT’s every email, to many individuals throughout its corporate structure, has gone without reply.

   

  In stating Google would stop its censorship in China, Google means it will continue to censor all the rest of us in every country. We find this hypocritical, to say the least.
• Google has implemented geolocational blocking in all other countries to protect their “national security interests” and to shield netizens from “culturally sensitive topics”. How very thoughtful.
• China’s overwhelmingly youthful population has reached over 1.4 billion people, 384 million of whom use the Internet. That’s 36.5% Internet penetration, an impressive figure in itself. For any company, China is an enormous market.
• That means Google’s real losses in China may be minimal. It seems reasonable that Google simply did not have the effective business model in China that they implement in the rest of the world. Chinese just don’t click on Google’s ads.

• Google’s business model is predicated on knowing the habits of every Internet user, to sell you stuff. Whether you like it or not, Google logs your searches, copies your email, records your contacts’ names and addresses, logs your chat sessions, records your phone calls, knows where you get your news and what topics are important to you, copies your documents, checks your research, knows where you’ve been, knows where you are, what you like to read and now follows you to every website. Google is a company that has no regard or concern whatsoever for your personal privacy. Google Sky, Google Moon and Google Mars might be safe…maybe. Most of us simply exchange our privacy for the convenience of using Google everything.

   

  So when Google says, no censorship in China…or else, we cock precisely one eyebrow. Do no evil, petabyte server Google has a hidden agenda here. It’s not about an affront to corporate secrecy by the (widely-presumed to be) Chinese government hack of Google’s Gmail accounts for Chinese human rights activists. Get real: that’s just for show. Nor do they care much about the other 31 US corporations the Chinese government hacked.
• The sad truth is that Google simply doesn’t have so much to lose in China. And they can always climb back into bed with China once this tiff is over and the world’s netizens have largely forgotten. Both sides, government and corporations just have their eyes on the money.
• Google has done exactly nothing in China to support human rights, free speech or a free press, including the citizen press, in China or, for that matter, in any other country. It has reliably failed to support or link any means for circumvention of China’s censorship to Chinese netizens such as TOR or Psiphon. Google hasn’t even created free proxies. That means we’re still standing in the cold whistling.
• It has been obvious Google has been setting about creating its own corporate vision of the Internet, through sheer might and money. But if Google really cares about ‘net freedoms, it will devote a miniscule portion of its enormous resource of brainpower to making the Internet uncensorable anywhere.

8 more annotations...

• Today, a number of netizens from China reported that the google.cn's image search on “Tiananmen” could find photos of the Tiananmen massacre. It seems that Google lnc. has shut down its filter. Twitterers from Beijing said that they would send flowers to Google office for their noble and brave act. But some were worried that Google will eventually shut down.

• 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.
• Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.
• Third, as 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 accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.
  
• We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China's economic reform programs and its citizens' entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.
• 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.
• Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer 

   

   

   

4 more annotations...