The world’s #1 search engine is vowing to take a stand against China.  The communist nation has censored results for the Chinese version of the search engine google.cn since it launched in 2006. The people of China only get search results the gov’t wants them to get.   Now viewing the censorship as a free speech and human rights issue Google is trying to find a way to work within the laws of China and make google.cn uncensored or possibly abandon operations in China if necessary.  To complicate things further, Google has accused the Chinese gov’t of a cyber attack, with a primary objective of gaining access to gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.  From the official Google Blog:

“First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

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.”

Internet freedom will continue to be a growing debate and with Google owning 67% of the search market in the U.S. they will continue to be influential.   Google’s actions with this issue will have a much bigger impact than simply what search results the people of China get to see.  Maybe a defiant Google will buck the trend of American companies bowing down to China just to get a piece of the 1.3 billion person market 253 million of which are internet users.  Probably not though.

Hilary Clinton’s speech themed around internet freedom on Jan 21st couldn’t of had better timing.  She said this “We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas”.  It’s nice to know our gov’t believes in the freedom of internet.  Doesn’t mean they won’t try to put all kinds of crazy restrictions around it though.