by Michael S. Malone
Two cheers for Google and Secretary of State Clinton.
Last week we saw Google publicly complain about China’s growing censorship of the Internet – and worse, cyber-attacks on Google’s search engine that were, in all likelihood, backed by the Chinese government. The search engine giant went so far as to threaten to leave the Chinese market if these concerns weren’t addressed.
Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a speech carried on the State Department web site, declared that unrestricted access to the Internet would become a top priority for the Administration – and directed sharp criticism at a number of countries around the world, notably Egypt and its recent arrest of 30 bloggers, for the recent spike in Internet censorship around the world.
But she gave special emphasis to China, now with the world’s largest number of Web users, calling on that government “to conduct a thorough review of the cyber intrusions that led Google to make its announcement. And we also look for that investigation and its results to be transparent.”
Secretary Clinton built her case on what might be called the “Three Internet Freedoms”:
- The right of all peoples to have access to an uncensored Internet.
- The right of individuals to exercise free speech on the Internet
- The right of businesses and other organizations to have access to uncensored information on the Internet in order to compete fairly.
Pretty impressive stuff, actually, and one showing a level of understanding about technology that one rarely encounters inside the Beltway. Kudos to Secretary Clinton for stepping up, in an era of kowtowing to dictators, for human freedom and (in the case of those Egyptian bloggers) liberty.
The question now, though, is whether there are any teeth in those threats.
Let’s take Google first. Not to be too cynical, but getting some back-up on this problem with China (as well as some anti-trust protection) from the Obama Administration was no doubt the reason Google chairman Eric Schmidt risked a lot the company’s goodwill sucking up to candidate Obama during and after the presidential campaign. In that respect, Sec. Clinton’s speech can be seen as a partial payback.
But what now? Washington is hardly in a position to put much leverage on Beijing these days. The Chinese hold a ton of our debt, the Chinese market is helping prop up many of our failing companies, and Chinese power around the world is growing, even as ours is, voluntarily, on the wane. The snubs by the Chinese premier to President Obama are now even the stuff of Saturday Night Live skits.
So, is the U.S. really prepared to ignite a trade war with China over Google censorship? Not hardly. We’ll complain, we’ll threaten, but in the end we’ll do nothing. China holds the cards on this one.
For now, with our current leadership, China is more powerful than the US.
Leave it to those inside the Beltway, and elsewhere, who take their cues from the “experts” who cannot resist playing God – leave it to them to give the impression that they have changed their spots.
I will believe that when a leopard changes its spots, for these deformed souls, scalawags, reprobates, and other assorted unsavoury ilk – they have the same lack of credibility as the “Brezhnev era apparatchik” referred to by Daniel Hannan, in his 3 and a half minute rebuttal of British Prime Minister
Brown at the European Parliament.
If Shrillary says yes she means no. If she says black she means white. The Clinton`s are proven liars and nobody should believe anything they say…
Wow, Hillary, you go, girl. (And here I thought it was the intention of the Obama administration to turn over control of the Internet to the UN.) She sounds like the Hillary of old who used to lecture the world about women’s and children’s rights. You are correct that there’s no bite behind the bark, nonetheless, it’s good to hear her state so emphatically what I hope is the administration’s position.
Lack of access to information may hurt small Chinese businesses, but the high-tech ones that the Party needs to succeed will simply filch the intellectual property of American firms. Is Hillary doing anything to stop the infiltration and the leeching of trade secrets? Trade secrets that not only have great monetary value but also help to preserve our national security?
And if the Chinese tell us to go buzz off
( which in fact they’ve already done) and carry on tightening the screws, then the USA will do…. what, exactly?
I blog about these issues all the time. Conservatives have yet to figure out their natural connection to the tech world. Free enterprise and open markets are the intellectual bedrock of all techies, but conservatives have yet to make hay out of it. Pathetic.
You know what China hears?
“Yap yap yap yap yap!”
That’s all the US is to them now, a small yapping dog. Lots of noise and anger but nothing to worry about.
Watch out for Hillary. She sees BO’s vulnerability. The statement the author references is probably her first campaign speech for the upcoming 2012 presidential election. I hate to sound too cynical, but, if she wins, her first self-imagined “mandate” will be to restrict the Internet for all but her lefty buddies and those oh-so politically correct types.
The Hill has taken the pulse of the nation (since Massachusetts) and is definitely positioning herself for a run in 2012.
Public confrontation is not an effective way to approach China to change their position. Going public as they did may make Google, Hillary or others feel good but it will not in the least help them accomplish their goal. Their confrontation accomplished zip!
My position has always been that the Internet will be one of the greatest engines for freedom ever. Governments may try to censor and block it, but the genie is out of the bottle. It will be extremely difficult, probably impossibe, for anyone to put it back in the bottle.
So ol’ Hillary is all fired up for internet freedom for the chicoms, but has no problem with ceding our 2nd Amendment rights to the UN ? What is up with that?
She ain’t talking to either China or Google – that’s not the way to talk to them. She’s talking to C. Sunstein through the American public.
It’s the czars, stupid.
I suspect folks are missing the forest for the trees. Google has made large claims about the security of their operation (“you can trust us”) yet a bunch of college kids in China can knock over their operation during lab days (just like they’ve done to other big companies, banks and defense contractors), not caring if they got caught or not walking off with all of Google’s secrets. What does this say about the access organized crime has to your secrets in the Google cloud, to say nothing of the much more expert nation-states?
What Google can’t have is people remembering that there’s security in being in herd of wildebeest, v. the one-big-target – and arguably much more security in the computer in your hand or under your desk or being maintained by your corporate IT department. And there’s nothing that’s done in the cloud that cannot be done at the edges, it’s all just software. And we all know that distributed solutions are much more survivable than centralized (be it a natural disaster or man made).
Speaking of which, how come Google hasn’t published its software for review (at least for security). It’s largely based on open source so they have a moral obligation (if not a GPL obligation) to publish it as well. It’s not like having the source code will diminish Google’s competitive advantage of having created the world’s largest database (of largely other people’s information, secret and not). And why is it all their current discussions about their issue is being treated like a state secret? (similar to Apple and their aggressive use of NDAs)? It’s not like this is a new problem. The rest of the industry has been living, dealing and adapting to these threats since early in the decade. It’s about time that company grew up. Including understanding that engaging with less than free nation-states is more freedom enhancing than not (v., say, Cuba).
Punk (#9): “Conservatives have yet to figure out their natural connection to the tech world. Free enterprise and open markets are the intellectual bedrock of all techies, but conservatives have yet to make hay out of it. Pathetic.”
Pathetic? What about the fact many of those oh-so-intelligent techies haven’t figured it out themselves? Do they need to be spoon-fed?
20@Bob
The only thing that finally anchored red states to cyberspace was porn.
#9 Speak for yourself.I figured it out 10 years ago.Its the rest of the continent thats just catching up now.As far as Hillery goes ,i hope she sticks it to the ChiComms over this issue.Too bad Obama is missing in action.Bush wouldve said the same darn thing Hillery said too.And as far as the ChiComms whining about it ,theyve been hacking for years going back to 2000 at least that ive been tracking.
The ChiComms cannot stop it.The internet will be a flood across their internet and the globe.
Didn’t Google help to build the Great Firewall in the first place? What have they got to moan about now?