Written evidence submitted by Google
Thank you for the invitation to provide comments
to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee Inquiry on East Asia,
regarding the decision of Google to launch services in China.
In the written submission below, we have set forth the situation
in China as we see it, the debate over the options we confronted,
the substance of what Google has decided to do there, the reasoning
behind that decision, and next steps for industry action that
could make a useful contribution to the objective of expanding
access to information in every corner of the globe.
By means of introduction, we acknowledge that
the decision on how to launch Google.cn has been a difficult exercise.
The requirements of doing business in China must respect the content
restrictions imposed by Chinese laws and regulations—including
self-censorship—which is counter to Google's most basic
values and commitments as a company. Despite that, we believe
that we can better serve the interests of users and expand access
to information by offering services in China.
We have made this decision, in part, given the
official policy of engagement that many companies as well as foreign
governments have taken with China in recent years. In fact, Google
is among the last of major Internet search providers to launch
services in China; and while we have agreed to filter content
in compliance with Chinese laws and regulations, we are the only
such company to publicly disclose that content is being filtered
to our users. We have also decided not to launch products that
may have required Google to disclose personal information or remove
content, such as our email service and blogs ("Gmail"
and "Blogger"), which would have provided a commercial
benefit.
THE BIG
PICTURE: THE
INTERNET IS
TRANSFORMING CHINA
The backdrop to Google's decision to launch
Google.cn is the explosive growth of the Internet in China. To
put it simply, the Internet is transforming China for the better.
And the weight of the evidence suggests that the Internet is accelerating
and deepening these positive trends, even in an imperfect environment.
Viewed broadly, information and communication technology—including
the Internet, email, instant messaging, web logs, bulletin boards,
podcasts, peer-to-peer applications, streaming audio and video,
mobile telephones, SMS text messages, MMS photo-sharing, and so
on—has brought Chinese citizens a greater ability to read,
discuss, publish and communicate about a wider range of topics,
events, and issues than ever before. There are currently more
than 105 million Internet users in China.[78]
Nearly half of them have access to broadband connections—an
increase of 41% since 2003.[79]
Even so, Internet deployment in China is at
a very early stage, reaching only about 8% of the population.[80]
Among Internet users, more than 80% are under 24 years of age.[81]
By 2010, China will have more than 250 million Internet users.[82]
And already, there are more than 350 million mobile phones, a
number growing by roughly 57 million annually.[83]
A recent and well-respected study by researchers at the Chinese
Academy of Social Science (CASS) documents some interesting, and
perhaps surprising, findings about the views of Chinese Internet
users:[84]
— Most Chinese Internet users believe
that the Internet is changing politics in China. Internet users
tend to agree that it will increase political transparency and
expand discourse: 63% believe that citizens will learn more about
politics by going online, 54% of users believe the Internet provides
more opportunities for criticizing the government, and 45% believe
that the Internet provides more opportunities to express political
views.
— Large majorities of Chinese believe
that certain kinds of Internet content, including pornography
and violence, should be controlled. However, only 7.6% believe
that political content on the Internet should be controlled.
— By a 10:1 margin, Chinese Internet
users believe that the Internet will make the world a better,
rather than worse, place.
Based on its results, the CASS Internet Survey
concludes that "the political impact of the Internet is more
significant than it is in other countries. The impact can be seen
not only in the relationship between government and citizens but
also among people who share similar political interests. Thus,
we can predict that as Internet becomes more popular in China,
the impact on politics will be stronger."[85]
THE PROBLEM:
ACCESS TO
GOOGLE IN
CHINA IS
SLOW AND
UNRELIABLE
Since 2000, Google has been offering a Chinese-language
version of Google.com, designed to make Google just as easy, intuitive,
and useful to Chinese-speaking users worldwide as it is for speakers
of English.
Within China, however, Google.com has proven
to be both slow and unreliable. Indeed, Google's users in China
struggle with a service that is often unavailable. According to
our measurements, Google.com appears to be unreachable around
10% of the time.
Even when Chinese users can get to Google.com,
the website is slow (and nearly always slower than our local competitors),
and sometimes produces results that, when clicked on, stall out
the user's browser. The net result has been a bad user experience
for those in China.
The cause of the slowness and unreliability
appears to be, in large measure, the extensive filtering performed
by China's licensed Internet Service Providers (ISPs). China's
laws, regulations, and policies against illegal information apply
not only to the Internet content providers, but also to the ISPs.
China has nine licensed international gateway data carriers, and
many hundreds of smaller local ISPs. Each ISP is legally obligated
to implement its own filtering mechanisms, leading to diverse
and sometimes inconsistent outcomes across the network at any
given moment. For example, some of Google's services appear to
be unavailable to Chinese users nearly always, including Google
News, the Google cache (ie, our service that maintains stored
copies of webpages), and Blogspot (the site that hosts weblogs
of Blogger customers). Other services, such as Google Image Search,
can be reached about half the time. Still others, such as Google.com,
Froogle, and Google Maps, are unavailable only around 10% of the
time.
Even when Google is reachable, the data indicates
that we are almost always slower than our local competitors. Third-party
measurements of latency (meaning the delay that a user experiences
when trying to download a webpage page) suggest that the average
total time to download a Google webpage is more than seven times
slower than for Baidu, the leading local Chinese search engine.
Users trying to get to Google will have different
experiences at different times of day, and from different points
on the Chinese network. For example, access to Google appears
to be speedier and more reliable in Beijing than in Shanghai,
and generally better in the largest cities compared to smaller
towns, suburbs, and villages.
Based on our analysis of the available data,
we believe that the filtering performed by the international gateway
ISPs is far more disruptive to our services than that performed
by smaller local ISPs. Because Google's servers have, to date,
been located exclusively outside China, all traffic to and from
Google must traverse at least one of China's international gateway
ISPs. Accordingly, Google's access problems can only be solved
by creating a local presence inside China.
Operating without a local presence, Google's
slowness and unreliability appears to have been a major—perhaps
the major—factor behind our steadily declining market share.
According to third-party estimates, Baidu has gone from 2.5% of
the search market in 2003 to 46% in 2005, while Google has dropped
to below 30% (and falling).[86]
The statistics are even direr among the college-age young, who
use Baidu more, and Google less, than their elders.
Part of this has been due to improvements in
Baidu's services and a major marketing campaign (funded by the
proceeds of its successful IPO in the US), but the leading cause
seems to be the Chinese users' annoyance at the persistent slowness
and unreliability of Google.
Google's Calibrated Approach
In light of the access problems that have plagued
Google in China, Google's management set out more than a year
ago to study and learn about China, to understand and assess our
options, to debate their relative merits, and to make a decision
that properly weighs both business and ethical considerations.
There is no question that, as a matter of business,
we want to be active in China. It is a huge, rapidly growing,
and enormously important market, and our key competitors are already
there. It would be disingenuous to say that we don't care about
that because, of course, we do. We are a business with stockholders,
and we want to prosper and grow in a highly competitive world.
At the same time, acting ethically is a core
value for our company, and an integral part of our business culture.
Our slowness and unreliability has meant that Google is failing
in its mission to make the world's information accessible and
useful to Chinese Internet users. Only a local presence would
allow Google to resolve most, if not all, of the latency and access
issues. But to have a local presence in China would require Google
to get an Internet Content Provider license, triggering a set
of regulatory requirements to filter and remove links to content
that is considered illegal in China.
So we were confronted with two basic options—[1]
stay out of China, or [2] establish a local presence in China—either
of which would entail some degree of inconsistency with our corporate
mission. In assessing these options, we looked at three fundamental
Google commitments:
(a) Satisfy the interests of users,
(b) Expand access to information, and
(c) Be responsive to local conditions.
The strongest argument for staying out of China
is simply that Google should not cross the line of self-censorship,
and should not be actively complicit in imposing any limits on
access to information. To be clear, the persistence of severe
access problems amid fierce competition from local alternatives
suggests that the consequence of this approach would be the steady
shrinking of Google's market share ever closer to zero. Without
meaningful access to Google, Chinese users would rely exclusively
on Internet search engines that may lack Google's fundamental
commitment to maximizing access to information—and, of course,
miss out on the many features, capabilities, and tools that only
Google provides.
On the other hand, we believe that even within
the local legal and regulatory constraints that exist in China,
a speedy, reliable Google.cn service will increase overall access
to information for Chinese Internet users. We noted, for example,
that the vast majority of Internet searches in China are for local
Chinese content, such as local news, local businesses, weather,
games and entertainment, travel information, blogs, and so forth.
Even for political discussions, Chinese users are much more interested
in local Chinese Internet sites and sources than from abroad.
Indeed, for Google web search, we estimate that fewer than 2%
of all search queries in China would result in pages from which
search results would be unavailable due to filtering.
Crucial to this analysis is the fact that our
new Google.cn website is an additional service, not a replacement
for Google.com in China. The Chinese-language Google.com will
remain open, unfiltered and available to all Internet users worldwide.
At the same time, the speed and technical excellence of Google.cn
means that more information will be more easily searchable than
ever before. Even with content restrictions, a fast and reliable
Google.cn is more likely to expand Chinese users' access to information.
We also took steps that went beyond a simple
mathematical calculus about expanding access to information. First,
we recognize that users are also interested in transparency and
honesty when information has been withheld. Second, users are
concerned about the privacy, security, and confidentiality of
their personal information. Finally, users want to have competition
and choices, so that the market players have a strong incentive
to improve their offerings over time.
Transparency
Users have an interest in knowing when potentially
relevant information has been removed from their search results.
Google's experience dealing with content restrictions in other
countries provided some crucial insight as to how we might operate
Google.cn in a way that would give modest but unprecedented disclosure
to Chinese
Internet users
Google has developed a consistent global policy
and technical mechanism for handling content deemed illegal by
a host government. Several of the countries in which we operate
have laws that regulate content.
In all of these countries, Google responds similarly.
First, when we get a court order or legal notice in a foreign
country where we operate, we remove the illegal content only from
the relevant national version of the Google search engine. Second,
we provide a clear notice to users on every search results page
from which one or more links has been removed. The disclosure
allows users to hold their legal systems accountable. This response
allows Google to be respectful of local content restrictions while
providing meaningful disclosure to users and strictly limiting
the impact to the relevant Google website for that country.
For China, this model provided some useful guidance
for how we could handle content restrictions on Google.cn in way
that would afford some disclosure when links have been removed.
Privacy and Security
Google is committed to protecting consumer privacy
and confidentiality. Prior to the launch of Google.cn, Google
conducted intensive reviews of each of our services to assess
the implications of offering it directly in China. We are always
conscious of the fact that data may be subject to the jurisdiction
of the country where it is physically stored. With that in mind,
we concluded that, at least initially, only a handful of search
engine services would be hosted in China.
We will not store data in any given location
unless we are confident that we can meet our expectations for
the privacy and security of users' sensitive information. As a
practical matter, this means that we have no plans to host Gmail,
Blogger, and a set of other such services in China.
Competition and Choice
Internet users in China, like people everywhere,
want competition and choices in the marketplace. Without competition,
companies have little incentive to improve their services, advance
the state of the art, or take innovative risks.
If Google were to stay out of China, it would
remove powerful pressure on the local players in the search engine
market to create ever-more-powerful tools for accessing and organizing
information. Google's withdrawal from China would cede the terrain
to the local Internet portals that may not have the same commitment,
or feel the competitive pressure, to innovate in the interests
of their users.
The Decision: What Google Is Doing in China
The deliberative process and analysis outlined
above led to the following decisions.
(1) Launch Google.cn. We have recently
launched Google.cn, a version of Google's search engine that we
will filter in response to Chinese laws and regulations on illegal
content. This website will supplement, and not replace, the existing,
unfiltered Chinese language interface on Google.com. That website
will remain open and unfiltered for Chinese-speaking users worldwide.
(2) Disclosure of Filtering. Google.cn
presents to users a clear notification whenever links have been
removed from our search results in response to local laws and
regulations in China. We view this as a step toward greater transparency
that no other company has done before.
(3) Limit Services. Google.cn today
includes basic Google search services, together with a local business
information and map service. Other products—such as Gmail
and Blogger, our blog service—that involve personal and
confidential information will be introduced only when we are comfortable
that we can provide them in a way that protects the privacy and
security of users' information.
Next Steps: Voluntary Industry Action
Google supports the idea of Internet industry
action to define common principles to guide the practices of technology
firms in countries that restrict access to information. Together
with colleagues at other leading Internet companies, we are actively
exploring the potential for guidelines that would apply for all
countries in which Internet content is subjected to governmental
restrictions. Such guidelines might encompass, for example, disclosure
to users, protections for user data, and periodic reporting about
governmental restrictions and the measures taken in response to
them.
Patricia Moll
European Policy Manager
Google
7 March 2006
78 "China Online Search Market Survey Report,"
China Network Information Center (CNNIC), August2005, "CNNIC
Search Engine Study". Back
79
Guo Liang, "Surveying Internet Usage and Impact in Five
Chinese Cities", Research Center for Social Development,
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, November 2005, "the CASS
Internet Survey", at iii. The CASS Internet Survey is a statistically
rigorous survey of internet users in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou,
Chengdu, and Changsha. Back
80
Id. Back
81
Id., at iv. Back
82
"15th Statistic Survey Report on the Internet Development
in China", China Network Information Center(CNNIC), 2005. Back
83
From statistics published by China's Ministry of Information
Industry. Back
84
CASS Internet Surevy., at iv-ix, 93-100. Back
85
Id. at 100. Back
86
CNNIC Search Engine Study. Back
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