As we’ve been telling people for six years, the global governance of the internet is creating geopolitics of the highest order. With the Google-China rupture and the subsequent responses of the US and Chinese territorial governments, it is clear that the issues of cybercrime, censorship, trade and technology policy are converging on the problem of transnational governance of internet-based communications.

As much as we appreciated Secretary Clinton’s ringing endorsement of internet freedom, however, to solve this problem we really need states to step back from the Internet. If this becomes an inter-state political matter, a clash between the Chinese and US nation-state apparatuses, at best only one state can win and for sure we, the world’s people, will lose. Politicians leading symbolic, flag-waving campaigns for their country’s values only provoke the same, polarizing response in the other country.

China’s response to Google’s open break with it was muted and slow at first. It was clear that they did not expect it and were not prepared with a response. China is not used to corporations that refuse to kow-tow. Better yet, there was evidence that Internet users in China supported Google’s move, and were willing to express their desire for a relatively uncensored Google to remain in their country. As a Wall Street Journal article noted, “An editorial published on the Web site of state-run newspaper Global Times [immediately after Google’s announcement] said Google's withdrawal could ‘imply a setback to China and a serious loss to China's Net culture,’ while others acknowledged that China's Internet market has benefitted from Google's presence.”

The entry of Hilary Clinton, U.S. Secretary of State, into the fray with her January 21 speech at the Newseum, a museum of journalism devoted to the American first amendment, on the other hand, provoked an immediate, coordinated and angry response from the Chinese state. 

Those without a historical perspective on both China and international communications policy may not have fully appreciated the nature of China’s response. China released its inner Mao Tse-tung, employing 1970s-era rhetoric about “imperialism.” I haven’t read any of the Chinese yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the term “spiritual pollution” was being bandied about again. (The anti-spiritual pollution campaign was launched in 1983 by the enemies of market reforms in China as part of an attempt to weed out Western influence.) China also revived critiques of the “free flow of information” and of U.S. “imbalanced flows” dating back to the New World Information and Communication Order debates of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In general, China’s response was a deliberate attempt to harness their people’s nationalism and to capitalize on still-salient feelings of humiliation dating back to the dismemberment of China by foreign powers from 1880-1940.

If that succeeds, Hilary’s speech has backfired. Instead of provoking a period of reflection in which the Chinese people hold their leaders’ policies accountable for damage to their internet access, suddenly the issue becomes American bullying.

The Chinese government’s response already seems to have succeeded in neutralizing quite a few mushy-headed western leftists, who are known for their ability to consider a hero anyone who criticizes market economies and the United States regardless of the value and benefit of the policies they promote (e.g., Hugo Chavez). The Chinese response pushed all the buttons that make these folks move: the small, helpless  <cough!> developing country against big, bad America; the idea that people who criticize these “small, helpless” states are being brainwashed by commercial corporate media; the distinction between culture and commerce and the need for strong states to protect cultural “diversity” against the depredations of those terrible market forces; the “forcible” export of American values and ideas, etc.

The degree to which one can see through these arguments can be considered a kind of Internet governance IQ test. There are so many things wrong with them that it would take a paper, not a blog post, to enumerate them. But these arguments are both a weapon and an expression of a worldview rather than an articulation of a policy based on reality. In China’s case, they are nothing but a political and ideological cover for the state’s nervous censorship and repression of its own population. China’s censorship is directed at blinding and managing its own people, not at protecting them from the American government or American corporations. Access to information through Google is initiated by Chinese users themselves, not blasted into their houses by American radio towers. On the internet, culture and commerce and inextricably linked, and any attempt to regulate or restrict access to digital goods and services is motivated mostly by economic protectionism, not by any claim of cultural diversity, for those policies limit and restrict user choices rather than increasing them. Given that the internet gives users unparalleled control over what they do and do not access, it is clear that it is the interests of a ruling elite, not the people, which underlie all censorship and content regulation policies. 

One correct accusation the Chinese made, however, is that the U.S. is as committed to cyber-war as the Chinese, and probably pioneered the concept. That again speaks to the links to nation-states.