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TECHNOLO GY
Why Google Quit China—
and Why It’s Heading Back
When American Internet companies do business
abroad, they are sometimes forced to do a
repressive government’s dirty work.
KAVEH WADDELL JANUARY 19, 2016

ANDY WONG / AP

When Google shut down its Chinese search

engine in 2010, it gave up access to an enormous
market. There are more than twice as many
people on the Internet in China as there are
residents in the U.S., and the number of Chinese
Internet users is growing at a rate that far
surpasses that of any other country. Google has
plans to return to China in the near future, but
why did it turn away from the country for so
long?

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Censorship is why. Google effectively shut down

its Chinese operations after it discovered a
cyberattack from within the country that
targeted it and dozens of other companies. And
while investigating the attack, Google found that
the Gmail accounts of a number of Chinese
human-rights activists had been hacked.

Google had set up shop in China four years

before the breach, offering a version of its services
that conformed to the government’s oppressive
censorship policies. At the time, Google officials
said they’d decided that the most ethical option
was to offer some services—albeit restricted by
China’s censors—to the enormous Chinese
market, rather than leave millions of Internet
users with limited access to information.

But the 2010 attacks prompted the company to

reverse course. Instead of complying with
government requests to filter its search results,
Google directed all of its Chinese traffic to the
uncensored Hong Kong version of its search
engine, a move that left the company vulnerable
to being completely shut down in China. Indeed,
Google’s services became inaccessible to most
Chinese users within months.

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Google’s move to pull the plug in China is an

extreme example of the kinds of decisions
Internet companies operating abroad are often
up against: If they want to do business, they have
to abide by local laws, which can include
restrictions on speech. And since the United
States has some of the most permissive freedom-
of-speech laws in the world, American companies
must adapt in order to do business even in parts
of the world that are culturally very similar to the
U.S.

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Western European countries, which receive top

marks from Freedom House for online openness,
are far less tolerant than the U.S. of hateful
speech and images. In Germany, where
distributing swastikas is considered hate speech
and is illegal, regulators recently investigated a
complaint that Facebook was not adequately
enforcing national hate-speech law. But it’s
inconceivable that Facebook would close down
its service in Germany just because the
government asks for more censorship than the
First Amendment would permit.

In countries with more repressive governments,

companies routinely receive requests to take
down a much wider range of content that
violates local laws. In Russia, for example,
speaking ill of public officials can lead to costly
libel suits; just across the Black Sea, “insulting
Turkishness” is punishable by fines and jail time.

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Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney at the

American Civil Liberties Union, says companies
should generally submit to governments’ requests
for censorship, if it means they can keep
delivering their services. But when they take
down content from their platform, Rowland
says, the company must be transparent.

“If these companies do whatever they’re capable

of doing to publicize that their content is being
screened, monitored, and sometimes censored by
governments, I think there’s a really good
argument that maintaining a social-media
presence is inherently a liberalizing force,”
Rowland said.

To that end, Google, Facebook, and Twitter all

publish a detailed annual transparency report,
where they show the number and type of
content-takedown or user-information requests
they received, and the number they complied
with, from each country where they operate. The
companies also lay out their rationale for dealing
with these requests: Facebook, for example, says
it checks every incoming request for “legal
sufficiency” and “reject[s] or require[s] greater
specificity on requests that are overly broad or
vague.” But even the most thorough transparency
report can be difficult to access in the countries
where the reported censorship is taking place.

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Rebecca MacKinnon, a prominent Internet-

privacy advocate at New America, says
companies should start thinking about how they
will deal with free-speech issues even before they
start doing business in a repressive state. “It’s
about anticipating in advance what positions
you’re going to be put in, and deciding in
advance whether that’s an acceptable position to
be in,” MacKinnon said. Many companies
undergo a “human-rights impact assessment”
before they expand to a new market with
potential censorship pitfalls.

The calculus that goes into making decisions

about free speech abroad is complicated. But
there are few things that companies can do to
push back against censorship-happy governments
without losing access to an entire country.

Companies can set up stringent review processes

for legal takedown requests. A stringent review
can make sure governments aren’t taking
advantage of Internet companies to censor
content outside the bounds of the law, and
thorough reporting and transparent policies can
spur local activism to change repressive laws.

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Twitter is an interesting test case. As with any

company, its tolerance for complying with
government requests can be gleaned from its
actions. Twitter’s transparency report shows a
sharp rise in takedown requests in 2015, driven
in large part by a high volume of requests from
Turkey and Russia; the company continues to
operate in both of those countries.

In Iran, however, where Twitter has been blocked

for more than five years, Twitter has made
changes to accommodate Iranian users that are
able to circumvent their government’s Internet
filters. The company recently began allowing
users with Iranian phone numbers to activate
two-factor authentication, a login option which
can protect accounts from being hacked.
Rowland called Twitter’s actions in Iran the
“ethical high-water mark for resisting
government attempts to censor access to
content.”

(A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on

the company’s legal and business decision-
making, and spokespeople for Google and
Facebook were not available to comment on this
story.)

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When deciding how to deal with censorship

abroad, companies aren’t going at it alone. The
Global Network Initiative, a privacy and digital
human-rights organization, provides a roadmap
for companies navigating business in repressive
legal environments. GNI members represent for-
profit companies—including Google and
Facebook—investors, and nonprofit and
academic organizations.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt speaks at the Chinese

University of Hong Kong in 2013. (Bobby Yip / Reuters)

MacKinnon, who was a founding member of

GNI and sits on its board, says the organization
provides a space for companies who are up
against tough choices to confer with other
members, academics, and privacy advocates, in
order to make informed decisions. But she says
most companies are too preoccupied chasing
short-term profits to put too much time and
energy into implementing long-term free-speech
protections. “GNI has at least put a framework
in place that’s preventing things from being
much worse than they’d otherwise be,”
MacKinnon said.

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Companies that do business abroad—even just

in Europe—are dealing with an increasing
number of government requests for content
takedowns every year. Europe’s two-year old
“right to be forgotten,” a European Union
decision that allows citizens to ask Google to
remove links to misleading, inaccurate, or
irrelevant information about them, has opened a
whole new category of content takedown
requests. And growing worry that terrorist groups
like the Islamic State are using social platforms to
recruit and spread propaganda means that more
governments are on the lookout for content that
promotes terrorism, which typically violates
platforms’ terms of service.

But while terms-of-service violations can result in

bans and content takedowns, most Internet
companies don’t report them in their
transparency reports. This is a problem, says
Rowland, because a government that’s
particularly active in flagging terms-violating
content for removal is essentially engaging in a
different form of censorship.

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The United Kingdom, for example, has taken

special advantage of flagging tools, and at least
one counter-terrorism unit in the U.K.
government has been granted “super-flagger”
status to request YouTube video takedowns,
allowing it to flag violations en masse.

One reason some companies don’t report

takedowns of content that violates their terms of
service is because they can’t tell which requests
come from governments. A spokesman for
Twitter said governments are required to use the
same mechanism for flagging tweets, photos, and
accounts as the general public must use. The
spokesperson said requests for takedowns based
on terms-of-service violations are “very rare.”

Even as requests for takedowns increase every

year, companies are engaging more and more
with the governments that issue them. Take
China: Google is hiring for dozens of positions
there as it prepares its reentry, and is working
toward an agreement to offer an app store for
Android devices that would only include
government-approved apps. In Pakistan, Google
launched a localized version of YouTube last
week that will adhere to local law, in a bid to get
the government to lift a ban on the service.

These expansions will allow Google access to a

large number of Internet users, delivering them
more information, and at the same time
bolstering the company’s bottom line. But for the
millions of Internet users in China, Pakistan, and
other places where censorship is the norm, the
tradeoff for getting to use new services remains
the same: Easily accessible information comes at
the cost of continued government control,
filtered through American Internet companies.

We want to hear what you think about this article.

Submit a letter to the editor or write to
letters@theatlantic.com.

KAVEH WADDELL is a former staff writer

at The Atlantic.
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