Google Re-entry and Great Firewall

In 2010, Google withdrew services from mainland China. According to a recent report, Google is reviewing the provision of Chinese domestic search services in a form that allows the Chinese government to censor it.

The Chinese government, as it is well known, inspects and blocks most of the Internet information through its own censorship system called the Great Firewall. Most of the social media services like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are not available, as far as the actual visitor to China is concerned. The Chinese government promoted this censorship system project in 1998 under the name of “golden shield project”

The completed Great Wall, the golden shield, can be used to monitor online criticism or immoral cultures that can corrupt the public, as well as violate the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China or close websites that criticize Chinese senior officials. The Wanli Firewall monitors political sensitive issues, unpleasant news, dissident messages, political enlightenment, postings on critical content in SNS, religious sites, and adult objects by more than 30,000 Chinese police.

The Great Wall firewall works in four stages. Step 1 is DNS blocking. If you put a URL in a block on the DNS, DNS looks for that IP address, but if the URL is blocked, DNS responds that it can not find the IP address, preventing users from opening the site.

The next step is to break through the DNS and check the connected IP address to stop the connection request if it is judged that it has entered the forbidden IP address. Third, block URL keywords. If the URL is not blacklisted but contains a prohibited word, it will initialize the request itself. The last is the page search. Even if the requested URL is opened, the whole page is checked again and the final approval is determined.

Nonetheless, the Internet population in China is estimated to reach 772 million by 2017. In the first year, 40 million people have increased, but the Internet penetration rate is still 55.8%. It is a market that can still expect growth. Over 95% of people accessing the Internet are using mobile devices such as smartphones, and 80% of Chinese smartphone users are Google users’ land users.

Why did this work? Google has been working on a code-named Dragonfly project since spring last year, according to foreign news reports. In December last year, Google CEO Sunda Pichy has developed a search app for Android that uses the censorship system of the Chinese government after the meeting with the executive committee member of Wang Hui Ning Political Bureau, who is called as the head of the Communist Party of China,

Google’s search app for Android, called Maotai and Longfei, has already been submitted to Chinese authorities and will be released after approval in the next six to nine months.

If you search using the Chinese domestic search application developed by Google, websites related to human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful demonstration will be deleted from the search results according to the filtering of the Great Wall censors. Disclaimer that some results may be deleted according to legal requirements Clause to display the rest of the search results.

Human rights groups say that if Google’s decision to comply with censorship in China is true, it will be a catastrophe in the information age. It is worrying that it will have a serious impact on not only China but also the freedom of the Internet as a whole.

Google has entered China in 2006. By 2010, China has provided search engine services. However, as negotiations between Google and the Chinese government broke down, Google moved its domain (Google.cn → Google.com.hk) to Hong Kong in 2010 to avoid Chinese censorship.

The same problem arose in January 2010 when Google announced that its blog had censured Google for cyber attacks from more than 20 US companies, including Google. Google said the attack was aimed at seizing the human rights activist account and that Gmail accounts were also attacked. Some of the companies that were attacked included Adobe and Symantec. In the case of Adobe attacks, he exploited vulnerabilities such as Adobe Reader to send malicious code to the company to steal source code. And exploited vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer.

It is argued that the attack is based on the Chinese government and that the IP address and the server used for the attack are all the same as those made up of Chinese government agents or agents. It was said that it was established with the support of People’s Liberation Army. The Chinese government, of course, denied it and argued that Google’s statement was unfounded and firmly denied.

In fact, Google has been censored by the Chinese government until 2006-2010 and has not shown any adverse results to the Chinese government. However, after the incident, Google refused to do so and began to show search results. Of course, the Chinese government immediately blocked access to Google in China. Google and the Chinese government have gone underground, and Google has made a move to file a complaint with the WTO while calling on the US government to cooperate. Google said it was firmly determined that it would not allow censoring of search results in China at the US Senate hearing.

Google has become more likely to withdraw from China and Yahoo is also supporting Google. The Chinese government emphasized that companies that want to enter the country should keep Chinese laws. After this process, Google moved its servers to Hong Kong in March 2010. It has virtually evacuated services in China.

Then in October 2015, Sunda Pisic re-emerged as Google’s CEO, changing the tone. He said during a conference in June 2016 that Google thinks that it wants to provide services for Chinese users, and that if Google can enter the Chinese market again, Google is always open. I can say that I took a gesture to improve relations with China.

If Google’s re-entry into the Chinese market is true, it’s hard to say that Google has succumbed to the censorship of the Chinese government so far, as some say. As mentioned earlier, Google already has a search engine service that allowed censorship in China by 2010. It is worth noting that at this time, there was a big difference in the Chinese market, which is different from the situation of Google and Baidu, which is big brother in Baidu’s share in China market. In this situation, if Google re-enters the market, it can be a point to see what happens.

In fact, the problem surrounding business in China is not just Google. According to the report, Apple will build an iClarified Data Management Center in China in February, leaving data management to a local corporation managed by the Chinese authorities. It is said that the iC cloud user data is freely accessible to companies controlled by the Chinese government.

Apple plans to build a data center in China to counter the cyber bills that the Chinese government implemented in June last year. This is because the law stipulates that the data center that will manage the Chinese data should be in China. Apple took over the iCloud data management to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data Industry (GCBD), a company located in Guizhou, China, which had to be criticized for giving Chinese user data to the Chinese government. The GCBD is a state-run business and is under government control. Apple, which has maintained high security, has been accused of succumbing to the Chinese government.

Apple has removed 674 VPN apps from the Chinese App Store last year. These VPN apps are often used by Chinese mainland users to circumvent the Chinese firewall censoring system. Of course, Apple’s goal is to sell the iPhone in China, the world’s largest smartphone market.

In fact, in China, you are being prosecuted for just selling VPN software. The Chinese government has been strengthening the VPN crackdown since last year. For this reason, human rights organizations have criticized Chinese authorities for imposing Internet restrictions on Internet freedom. There is also concern that there may be adverse effects such as the fact that the VPN is prohibited in Russia as well as the purpose of controlling information while controlling the VPN which can bypass the Great Wall firewall. The news of Google re-entry in China is just one aspect of the Chinese Internet market.