Google, a $22-billion-a-year U.S. Company, a leader in the global search market and online advertising, has a cozy relationship with the Obama administration. After all, Google executives and staffs have donated over three-quarter of a million dollars to the Obama campaign. Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, actively supported Obama during the presidential campaign by becoming an informal economic adviser. After the election, Schmidt served as a member of Agama’s Council of Science and Technology Advisers. Schmidt is also the head of the New America Foundation, a public policy research think tank which has great influence on policy making in Washington.1.
Since he entered office, Obama has appointed a number of former Google executives to his administration. Notably, Andrew McLaughlin, the former head of Google’s global public policy, who was named deputy chief technology officer, which would put him “in a position to shape policy that affects Google’s rivals.”1.
Founded in 1998, Google has come a long way from operating primarily as a search engine and has rapidly moved into diverse operations such as telecommunications, digitizing books and distributing video contents. As a result, Google’s rivals are not happy about the encroachment of this ambitious new actor into their fields of business. Google’s rivals are raising serious concerns that have sparked several investigations.1.
One of the upcoming battles in Washington is the regulation of the Internet, and “Google favors a policy that prohibits telecom providers and cable operators from interfering with any content that runs on those networks.”1.
Internationally, Google also favors freedom of operation and is against any interference with its content distribution. For this reason, it has run into conflict with the Chinese authority. Although Google agreed to abide by Chinese laws and regulations when it entered the Chinese market in 2005, Google has not been a good corporate citizen in keeping its promise. In China, the government treats the problem of pornography on the Internet seriously; its citizens have been recruited “to patrol internet cafes for vulgar content and to prevent minors from accessing the computers.”3. There have been increasing concerns that Google’s search engine, links to thousands of pornographic websites. According to a Chinese news agency, Google has persisted in “providing links to many obscene pictures, videos and articles, despite warnings in January and April” 2009. 2. In June, 2009, Google admitted that a “huge amount of porn and lewd information” had been disseminated by its website to the Chinese internet users. Google official apologized publicly and promised to rectify the situation and report to the Chinese officials. Google head office in the Silicon Valley grudgingly issued a statement on June 22, 2009: “We are undertaking a thorough review of our service and taking all necessary steps to fix any problems with our results."4.
Subsequently, China launched a new crackdown on the Internet and mobile phone porn on December, 2009. This is a sharp contrast to the United States, the country of the origin of the pornography industry, where the peddling of pornography is not punished by law. As a result, the industry has experienced rapid growth. This growth was fuelled by the liberalization of laws that regulated the sex and pornography industry.
Google, a company from the United States, accustomed to operating in an unregulated environment, naturally found it difficult to do business in China. Although having been forced to apologize to the Chinese government and its people, Google always felt a high degree of restriction with China’s “censorship.” It is reasonable to conclude that Google with its connection to the powerful people in the Obama administration has made its case for free Internet access in China.
Not surprisingly, on January 8th, 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted a dinner at the State Department with a two-hour discussion about technology. The guests included Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey, Microsoft Chief Security Officer, and executives from Cisco. The discussion centered on how technology can be used as a tool for American diplomacy. Clinton considered American 21st-century technology like Twitter, Google, and You Tube could be effective instruments to “encourage civil society development, and fight violence and oppression” around the world. In other words, it could be used to engineer demonstration for a regime change, as in the case of Iranian election in 2009, or a Color Revolution.5.
According to one participant, “the U.S. State Department is strongly supporting and encouraging digital diplomacy.” At the end of the discussion, it concluded that effort should be made to encourage “global citizens to build applications that can advance these goals,” and to “ensure that Internet access is always freely available.” 5. After the dinner, Hillary Clinton declared that “We are using all tools at our disposal to practice 21st-Century Statecraft…harnessing the power of technology.”5. It looks as if digital diplomacy will be another powerful instrument for the Obama administration to advance America’s global interest.
Concurrently, an article by Senator Richard Lugar, a Republican Ranking Member in the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations appeared in Foreign Policy, in which the Senator extols the virtue of the social network sites such as the Twitter, You Tube and mobile phone technology to support “grassroots movements for freedom and civil rights.”6. Apparently, digital diplomacy has reached bipartisan consensus.
Only a few days after the State Department dinner, Google, armed with strong backing from the Obama administration, threatened to discontinue its operation in China. In a statement entitled “A New Approach to China”, Google cited cyber attacks as the reason for pulling out of China. It hinted that the Chinese government might be involved in the attacks. It also raised the issue of freedom of speech, as the statement stated: “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 operation in China.”7.
Not surprisingly, Google’s announcement drew immediate backing from the U.S. State Department. State Department spokesman declared that the United States will issue a formal diplomatic message to Beijing to “express our concern for this incident” and ask for an explanation. According to a source in Washington, coinciding with this Google incident, Secretary Clinton will also deliver a speech on Internet freedom with special reference to China in short order.8.
Google’s statement shocked many people including industry insiders such as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who stated that cyber attacks were common occurrences, every where: “We’re attacked every day from all parts of the world and I think everybody else is too. We didn’t see anything out of the ordinary."9.
Google threatening to pull out of China was applauded by the Western media and human rights groups, and they viewed it as a courageous move and served as a wake-up call to companies in China. However, they conveniently forgot that “Google is, in fact, a key participant in U.S. military and CIA intelligence operations involving torture; subversion of foreign governments; illegal wars of aggression; and military occupations of countries which have never attacked the U.S. and which have cost hundreds of thousands of lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere.”10.
Google’s deep involvement with the CIA includes the supply of core search technology to 37,000 U.S. spies. In fact, according to Robert Steele, a former CIA officer, Google is “in bed with the CIA.” Google has ties with a venture capital firm which is funded by the CIA. The company also supplies mapping technology for the U.S. drones, the unmanned aerial vehicles, which have killed civilians both in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They did this without any concern for the safety of the innocent civilian population, in flagrant violation of international law and without any respect for the sovereignty of the state.
Another proprietary software, Google Friends has been used to spy on millions of the Internet users. It is hypocrisy their pretending to be concerned about the attacks on a few Google emails in China, and at the same time fully cooperating with U.S. intelligent agency to spy on social media internationally.10.
Domestically, Google has no problem in cooperating with the authority of the United States in implementing the U.S.A. Patriot Act of 2001. The Patriot Act gives the U.S. government the power to monitor and spy on Americans. U.S. intelligence officials can access Google’s email service and “scan documents, pick out certain words and create profiles of the authors.”12. This is a gross intrusion on American citizens’ privacy and a violation of basic human rights, of which Google has accused the government of China. But the violation of rights and freedom in the U.S. has not raised any objection from Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, as he openly proclaimed in an interview: “we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”13.
Apparently, Google has no problem with human rights violation in the United States. It is rather disingenuous that Google would use censorship as an excuse for pulling out of China, as Google knew there was censorship in China when it entered the Chinese market. As a matter of fact, Google was so eager to expand its business in China that it hired a Chinese executive from Microsoft, at risk of a lawsuit.14.
Unfortunately, after incurring considerable expenses and investing heavily, Google was simply not successful in China, as after 5 years, its market share was only hovering around less than 13 percent. To reverse this trend and jump ahead of its Chinese domestic competitors, Google resorts to an outrageous demand by asking the Chinese government to have the sole privilege of operating “an unfiltered search engine.” Google will then be in a position of peddling pornography to poison Chinese youth as well as to propagate messages from dissents abroad to destabilize China. To many Chinese, it is a reminder of the 19th century colonial “extraterritoriality”, which conferred privileges on the expatriates in China. It is rather astonishing that any Western multinationals still have the audacity to utter this kind of demand as a price for doing business in contemporary China.14.
Indeed, there is also no lack of audacity on the part of the U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, when she delivered her speech on Internet freedom in Washington on January 21, 2010. She accused China and other countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam where there have been a “spike in threats to the free flow of information” over the past year. She declared that unrestricted Internet access will be a top U.S. foreign-policy priority. She pressed China to investigate Google’s complaint with respect to the cyber attack, and such inquiry should be fully “transparent.”15.
Hillary Clinton, in her customary arrogant fashion, delivered her message with a veiled threat to China’s economic interests: “Countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century.”15. Clinton practiced digital diplomacy in earnest as she even hinted that U.S. multinationals might even abandon China: “Increasingly, U.S. companies are making the issue of information freedom a greater consideration in their business decisions.”15.
The threat of Google to exit China over the cyber attack has ignited a firestorm in the Western media. It once again demonstrated the fallacy of China’s policy of unlimited market access to the Western multinational firms. It is increasingly apparent that by allowing firms such as Google to operate in China, the Chinese youths will be corrupted by the decadent American pornography industry and the dysfunctional culture of Hollywood films and music. This is in direct conflict with the puritan culture of China. Moreover, ex-politician such as Hillary Clinton, under lobby influence of U.S. Big Business would like to use pressure and threaten China. Their objective is to gain special privilege and achieve a dominant position in the Chinese market. America’s geopolitical objective is to ruin the Chinese culture and destabilize the Chinese society through digital diplomacy to practice the 21st century Statecraft.
Ironically, the digital diplomacy of the 21st century is little different from gun boat diplomacy of the 19th Century, as both are instruments used to open up markets for Western multinational firms.
For China, the choice should be easy. The exit of Google and other American corporations from China should be welcome news; it offers China a good opportunity to support her domestic industry by limiting market access to the predatory Western multinational firms.
Notes:
1. Yang, Jia Lynn and Easton, Nina: “Obama and Google”, November 9, Fortune
2. Xinhuanet.Com: “China blocks some Google result, citing pornography concerns”, June 19, 2009
3. Modine, Austin: “China recruits volunteer. Net porn policy”, June 19, 2009 The Register
4. Fay, Joe: “Google submits to Beijing porn drive”, June 22, 2009 The Register
5. Liebman, Jason: “Perspective on Digital Dinner with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton”, January 8, 200l Huffingtonpost.com
6. Lugar, Richard G.: “Twitter vs. Terror”, January 6, 2010, Foreign Policy.com
7. Vascellaro, Jessica E. and Dean Jason: “Google Warns of China Exit Over Hacking”, January 13, 2010 Wall Street Journal
8. Nakashima, Ellen: “U.S. to rebuke Chinese government over Google incident”, January 15, AP
9. Reuters: “Microsoft CEO says No China exit” January 14, 2010 Reuter
10. Sommer, Eric: “Google’s China Hypocrisy Ignores Deep CIA Connections”, www.market oracle. co UK
11. Nakashima, Ellen: “U.S. to rebuke Chinese government over Google incident”, January 15, AP
12. Avery, Simon: “Patriot Act Haunts Google Service”, March 24, 2008 Globe and Mail
13. Schmidt, Eric: “Patriot Means You Have No Privacy” December 10, 2009 Firedoglake.com
14. Xinhua: “Google is simply not successful in China”, January 17, 2010
15. Gorman, Siobha and Canaves, Sky: “Clinton urges China to Investigate Google Case”, January 21, 2010 Wall Street Journal
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