CASE OF GOOGLE CENSORSHIP IN CHINA

Also, lawyers involved in defending human rights activists are routinely jailed. The Chinese government has for many years been reported for cracking down hard on criticism against the government (King, Pan & Roberts 2013,p. China has also been termed the “World Leader of Internet Censorship” by the Human Rights Watch, which informs the mainstay of this article. The Chinese government has on its payroll about 50,000 employees dedicated to Internet censorship and whose primary role is to block and remove information that is critical of the ruling party and the Chinese government. This article discusses at length the clash between Google and the Chinese government regarding online censorship. Through this mode of operation, the company did not suffer the adverse effects of Chinese regulation as its infrastructure was not within the physical boundaries of China.

Also, the company was not mandated to seek a license from Chinese authorities for its operations. However, the situation abruptly changed in 2002 when Google’s Chinese version was made inaccessible for users especially from Chines universities and college (Stevens, Xie & Peng 2016,p. This allowed Baidu to emerge as the best-performing internet search service provider in the Chinese market. In order to challenge Baidu’s dominance of the Chinese Internet market, Google developed a website specifically and conceded to demands from the Chinese government that the content made available to internet users be censored by means of a filter system referred to as “The Great Firewall of China”. com. hk where unfiltered content was made available to users through Google’s own servers thus making China’s sabotage of Google’s mainland servers ineffective.

Google’s experience in China serves as an example of the difficulties experienced by multi-national companies in China. Furthermore, the case of Google in China provides the opportunity of revisiting the debate on the relations between human rights and trade law (Svensson 2002). The Google in China case is unique in the context of this debate primarily because of a variety of issues including the fact the Internet search services under discussion recently entered the global scene and were thus not a priority of the General Agreement on Trade in Services. The Internet also boosted the national economy by supporting e-commerce and the entertainment industry including animations, online gaming and the distribution of videos and music. The growing cyber-culture in the country has been responsible for inspiring the development of many industries.

However, the rapid growth of the Internet does not imply that Chinese authorities have not added the cyberspace to their list of closely regulated mediums. Since 1994, Chinese authorities have enacted multiple regulations and laws concerning Internet freedom. For instance, article 5 of the 1997 “Measures for Security Protection Administration of the International Networking of Computer Information Networks” bans the circulation of data that primarily relates to social order and resistance against government activities. cn started being redirected to Google. com. hk which used servers based in Hong Kong. However, the Chinese government disapproved of this development and even threatened to fail to renew Google’s Internet Content Provider license. However, Google managed to avoid a possible discontinuation of its google. Nonetheless, the issues of self-censorship and blocking of google.

com are covered by the regulations of the WTO. The blocking of google. com is, in particular, a major step toward infringing the human rights of Chinese users. Moreover, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the right to “seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” is a fundamental human right (Wacker 2003,p. The mission of the company states that the company purposes “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Also, Google has an internal code ,that is part of its organizational culture and values, to support the access of unfiltered and reliable information by members of the public and to eliminate falsehoods and misleading data from its databases.

In the wake of the rise of a “fake news” and “propaganda” generation where people are quick to mislead other Internet users on events happening around the world, Google has dedicated significant resources to challenge and verify any potentially misleading information before it reaches the public. Google therefore owes its customers impartiality in delivering information considering the Internet is a major source of information in the modern era. Google’s clash with China, therefore, is an example of the infringement of the human rights to opinion, freedom of speech and unlimited access to information (Tan & Tan 2012,p. E. How censorship in China allows government criticism but silences collective expression.  American Political Science Review, 107(2), pp. Peerenboom, R. Assessing human rights in China: why the double standard.