Google Diplomats Bend Free Expression to Preserve Global Power

Janine Zacharia
Bloomberg News
Tuesday, June 3, 2008

June 3 (Bloomberg) -- When Thailand blocked Google Inc.'s YouTube Web site last year, the company dispatched deputy general counsel Nicole Wong to help restore access. In Bangkok, a sea of yellow shirts stunned her.

It was a Monday, when Thais wear yellow to honor King Bhumibol Adulyadej. Seeing their reverence, Wong says she grasped why officials reacted so strongly to a video blending a picture of Bhumibol with graffiti -- an image that ran afoul of a law against insulting the 80-year-old monarch. Google agreed to block the clip in Thailand while leaving it available elsewhere, and YouTube returned to Thai computers.

Welcome to the culture clashes that Google and other U.S. Internet companies are navigating from Thailand to Turkey and China to Pakistan. The owner of the world's most popular online search and video sites is learning to live with countries that ``don't share the same baseline'' about the Web, Wong, 39, says in an interview at Google's Mountain View, California, headquarters. These governments ban objectionable material because they ``don't know how else to control it.''

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The Internet superpower's corporate diplomacy is establishing far-reaching practices to keep online content, and advertising dollars, flowing across borders. Google's ambassadors, a collection of lobbyists and lawyers, are traveling the globe to gauge what governments will tolerate -- and showing a readiness to bend America's cherished belief in free expression.

`Multinational Environment'

``The notion that companies chartered in the United States do things in other countries they would never dream of doing in the United States is discomforting, obviously,'' says John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ``I think, though, this is the reality of doing business in a multinational environment, joined by a common technological network, which is the Internet.''

China, with an estimated 230 million people online, has been at the center of the Web freedom controversy, especially since Yahoo! Inc., Google's rival, turned over e-mails and other information to the Chinese government in 2006, leading to the imprisonment of journalist Shi Tao and writer Wang Xiaoning.

``While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies,'' then-House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos told Yahoo executives, including founder and chief executive officer Jerry Yang, during a 2007 hearing.

Financial Support

Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, apologized, provided financial support to the prisoners' families and asked the U.S. to discuss their plight with China.

In response to the Yahoo fiasco, Google decided not to offer Gmail, its popular e-mail service, in China to avoid government demands for messages. To prevent disruptions to its Chinese operations, the company maintains regular contact with officials through its office in Beijing.

Those ties are too cozy for some. Two years ago Google created a version of its search engine -- Google.cn -- that produces Chinese government-sanctioned material when people inside China seek anything on Tibet, Taiwan or Tiananmen Square.

``Even though Google and other companies now provide a disclaimer to notify users that censorship occurs, they still decide what to censor and whether they will even challenge the government's actions,'' Arvind Ganesan of New York-based Human Rights Watch told a U.S. Senate panel on May 20.

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