Last week, Google proposed something quite extraordinary: pulling its search service from Australia if Canberra passed new legislation targeting internet giants.
Key points:
- Google pulled its service from mainland China in 2010 after a sophisticated cyber attack reportedly backed by Beijing
- Expert says after Google's departure, China's tech industry has built a comprehensive ecosystem
- Australians would likely turn to VPNs to access Google if the search service was shut down
Google Australia managing director Mel Silva argued the bill — which would force tech giants to pay for news they linked to — would create "unmanageable financial and operational risk" to its business.
The proposed law — the News Media Bargaining Code — would also order Google to establish commercial agreements with every news outlet, otherwise the search engine could face forced arbitration.
It's not the first time Google has found itself in a situation like this.
In 2010, Google and other tech companies were the subject of a "highly sophisticated and targeted" cyber attack originating in China and reportedly backed by Beijing.
The attack prompted Google to stop complying with Chinese censorship demands, which saw its service soon shut down.
And now most of China's more than 900 million netizens, who account for nearly 20 per cent of active internet users around the world, can't easily access the search engine.
But the standoff with Beijing over censorship does help inform how Australians might be affected if the company terminates its service here.
What happened to Google.cn?
Google.cn was launched in China in 2006.
But after the cyber attack in 2010, Google decided to redirect traffic to Google.com.hk in Hong Kong, where the censorship rules didn't apply.
It meant Chinese netizens were temporarily able to access uncensored search results, including articles about the Tiananmen Square massacre, before Beijing cracked down and the service became inaccessible.
Google's departure allowed its Chinese competitor Baidu to soon capture three-quarters of China's search market.
Baidu faced its own issues though, particularly over its pay-for-placement results and one incident in which a student died after getting experimental cancer treatment from a hospital that appeared at the top of a Baidu search.
Expats and Chinese netizens who still wanted access to Google's uncensored results have been turning to technology such as virtual private networks (VPNs) and proxies.
However, authorities have in recent years been increasingly punishing people using unauthorised VPNs.
Google tried to reignite its presence in China with a project called Dragonfly, but the controversial search engine was also terminated after being criticised for its attempt to provide censored content.
Dr Min Jiang, professor of communication studies at the University of North Carolina, told the ABC that although Google pulled its search services, the company still actually existed in China courtesy of an AI research centre it opened in Beijing in 2017.
But she said the shutdown of Google search, which at one point had 30 per cent of the market in China, had been "a boon" to other Chinese tech companies, including Baidu.
"After 2016, when we learned about Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal, the US tech giants … have been viewed worldwide, including in China, with increasing suspicion.
"It's really hard to say if Google would be embraced, if Google decided to open its service again in China."
Are there any lessons for Australians?
Google has about a 90-95 per cent share of the search engine market in Australia.
Similarly to the Chinese example, if Google was to quit Australia other alternatives would still remain such as Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo and privacy-focused site DuckDuckGo.
But how much users might turn to these providers is not clear.
In 2016, Chinese writer and photographer Yang Fei published an investigative report, which has received million of views, helping to explain to younger generations why Google was not accessible in China.
He told the ABC that he was keeping a close eye on Google's standoff with Canberra, and suggested that Australians should be prepared for different scenarios.
Living in China's southern Hunan province, Mr Yang has been using a VPN to access Google since 2010.
He said Google could redirect the Australian search page to an equivalent version in another country.
But the practice would likely have a major impact on localised search results that thousands of Australian businesses rely on.
If Google was to block Australian users based on their geographic location, Mr Yang said Australians would still be able to use VPNs, which some tech-savvy people already use to stream geo-blocked content.
"To be honest … the case between the Australian Government and Google has been a great example to reflect on the monopoly in technology."
Dr Jiang stressed it was important to remember that Google's "first and foremost concern is not democratisation", but its own bottom line.
"I think most people would recognise how naive it was to assume Western technology somehow would bring openness and democracy to an authoritarian society," Dr Jiang said.
The ABC has approached Google Australia for comment.
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2021-01-29 19:55:00Z
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