Page 1 of 2 Winner of Google-China feud is - India
By Peter Lee
Google isn't doing well in China, and President Barack Obama isn't doing well
in the United States. These twin realities have helped trigger a high-profile
confrontation with China.
On January 12, Google responded to a sophisticated hack of its Google.cn
servers, apparently emanating from within China, with the threat that it would
stop filtering its Google.cn search results in compliance with the demands of
the Chinese government, even if that meant Google would have to close its China
operations.
Google's high-profile response will contribute, perhaps inadvertently, to
fraught broader US-China relations in the coming
year. Inevitably, the attractiveness of China's emerging rival, India, as a
market for Google and ally for the United States will enter into the mix.
In contrast to its also-ran status behind Baidu in China for search engines,
the travails of its Youtube service as a frequently-blocked avenue for dissent
inside China and the absence of a social networking option inside the People's
Republic of China), Google enjoys an overwhelming market share for its search
engine, media and networking business in India.
In India, 89% of Internet searches go through Google, 68% of India's social
networking occurs on Google's Orkut service, and 82% of media is viewed on
Youtube, according to the Internet marketing research company comscore.com.
Astonishingly, Indian users spend almost 30% of their entire online time on
Google sites - three times the world's average.
Ironically - or, perhaps, hypocritically, given its stalwart anti-censorship
position in China - Google censors its search engine results in India to
conform to Indian laws (for instance, banning search results for pre-natal sex
testing) [1] and cooperates with Indian police to identify political
malcontents for arrest in response to their Orkut postings. [2]
Google's high-profile demolition of its relationship with China may not simply
be a matter of outrage at the hacking of pro-democracy e-mails.
Bruce Schneier, a well-known US cyber security expert, made waves in the IT
community with an op-ed on CNN on January 23 [3] asserting that the e-mail
hacker had obtained the e-mail information by accessing Google's own internal
intercept system - a program designed to enable Google to collect user
information in response to US government demands.
If this is the case, the e-mail hack is more of an embarrassment for Google
than anything else: an indication that Google had not only created the
application to enable governments to spy on e-mail accounts, it had done such a
poor job of protecting it that it could be hijacked by malicious parties.
The actual significance of the e-mail hack is open to question.
Only a handful of accounts were accessed, and apparently yielded no more
information than the kind that the US government is supposed to get in response
to a subpoena: account information and subject line. No message text was
compromised, according to Google.
In a January 21 conference call with financial analysts, Google executive Eric
Schmidt stated that Google wasn't even sure that the e-mail intrusion was
related to the larger hack, now known as the Aurora exploit.
Aurora was a sophisticated, simultaneous industry-wide penetration of sensitive
computers at Google, Adobe and perhaps more than two dozen other Silicon Valley
companies, possibly a "zero day" attack intended to exploit an intrinsic
weakness in Internet Explorer (IE) for maximum effect before the attack itself
compelled Microsoft to issue a patch to plug the leak.
The target of this multi-front blitzkrieg was apparently a quest for IT's crown
jewels - source code.
This cyber-sparring between Western high-tech companies and Chinese hackers is
a historical albeit worrisome feature of the complicated relationship between
US IT companies and the large Chinese market they hope to serve.
The large scale and synchronized timing of the assault has caused the target
companies to point the finger, albeit gingerly and with caveats, directly at
the Chinese government.
It is an open question whether the scale of the attack reflects Chinese
government involvement, or an awareness of the transient nature of IE
vulnerability and the resultant desire of networked private or semi-private
Chinese hackers to exploit the flaw massively before it could be discovered and
repaired.
Another anxious aspect was added to the case as rumors spread that Google
suspected that a Chinese employee of its organization inside China may have
facilitated Aurora's intrusion onto a computer with administrative privileges,
thereby opening significant domains of the Google realm to inspection and
downloading by the hackers.
However, Google took an important and inflammatory step of escalating its
conflict with China by using the e-mail hack against democracy advocates to
wrap itself in a human-rights flag. As a result, its threat to stop censoring
its Google.cn search engine in retaliation for the hacks has become a cause
celebre for free speech and Internet-rights activists.
This cause has been taken up by the US government.
The Obama administration is smarting from its devastating political defeat in
the Massachusetts senate election, a defeat that has removed the Democrat
Party's supermajority and put it on track for possible electoral catastrophe at
November's mid-term congressional elections - unless it can rally its
disaffected base of liberal and progressive voters. Thus, Obama's government is
set to embark on a populist anti-banking campaign inside the US and a
crowd-pleasing anti-China campaign internationally.
Google's emergence as a champion of Internet openness is, in a certain sense,
rather ironic. Its data-collection capabilities extend from cookies to
click-logging, which involves the recording of a user's search terms for two
years and has aroused the concern of the European Union, the US government and
privacy advocates. The tools are likely the envy of China's busy public and
Internet security monitors.
Google is no stranger to cooperation with security services in the United
States as well as abroad.
Google has an intimate relationship with the US intelligence community. It
acquired one of its signature services - Google Earth - from the Central
Intelligence Agency's acknowledged not-for-profit venture capital arm,
In-Q-Tel. As part of a one-hand-washes-the-other synergism between the private
and public sector, In-Q-Tel's director of technology assessment, Rob Painter,
moved to Google in 2005 to become chief technologist for federal business. His
main job: selling Google Earth imagery back to the government.
The company itself is secretive not only about the precious algorithm that
drives its world-beating search engine, but about everything else. Despite
enjoying the benefits of being a publicly-traded company, its ownership is
structured to enable close control by its founding members. It accumulates
gigantic amounts of data concerning its users - including information from the
over 75 billion Google searches, 10 billion Youtube views and hundreds of
millions of Doubleclick ad page views per month they undertake - so it can
target them with advertising tailored to their needs and weaknesses.
In an unintentionally ironic twist, Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt
turned the company's ballyhooed motto - Don't Be Evil - into a warning to
Google's users in an interview with CNBC in December 2009. [4]
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't
be doing it in the first place," Schmidt said. "If you really need that kind of
privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this
information for some time and it's important, for example, that 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."
Google is committed to an open Internet because this provides the maximum
leverage for its competitive advantage as the pre-eminent search engine. Google
also relies on the open Internet to allow it to collect the full spectrum of
data that allows it to characterize and exploit the monetary potential of its
users.
The one area in which Google cannot tolerate openness is in the one area the
hackers targeted: the secrets of its search engine.
It would not be surprising if Google decided to make a public issue of the
December 2009 intrusions in order to get the Chinese government to crack down
on hackers within its borders, be they public or private actors.
Perhaps it discounted the risk of Chinese displeasure with the rationalization
that, ultimately, Google's future probably lies in India, not China.
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