Query

The IP-Browser (Govcom.org) for instance played with the linearity of querying the Web. It creates an alternative browsing experience that foregrounds the Web’s machine habitat and returns the user back to the basics of orderly Web browsing. The IP Browser looks up your IP address, and allows you to browse the Websites in your IP neighborhood, one by one in the order in which they are given in the IP address space.

Shmoogle (Tsila Hassine/De Geuzen) also deals with linearity on the Web, specifically the linearity of the search returns of Google. De Geuzen state that the best search returns that Google offers are not necessarily always the ones at the top. Unfortunately this is where the average Google user gets stuck. Shmoogle offers a way to find the search results in a chaotic way, and in doing so it ensures greater democracy.

The Internet Says No (Constant Dullaart) is a animated, fully functioning Google page (Google is placed in a marquee-frame). this work offers a pessimistic way to surf the internet.

The Misspelling-Generator (Linda Hilfling & Erik Borra). Erik Borra presented the work as a result of the fight against internet censorship. When doing a search in the Chinese version of Google on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Linda Hilfling discovered a temporary loophole out of the Google self-censorship in China. By deliberately spelling Tiananmen incorrectly, she was taken to web-pages where other people had misspelled Tiananmen, and was thereby able to access pictures of demonstrations as well as the legendary image of the student in front of the tank through the sources of incorrect spellings. The Misspelling generator is a tool that can be used for internet activism. By writing variations like ‘tianamen’ and ‘tiananman’ the isolation politics of the Google’s spelling corrector can be subverted while Google’ selfcensorship can be circumvented.

Images

Z.A.P. (ApFab) is an automatic image generation installation. First you add a word using the ApFab touch-screen, then the ZapMachine will grab an image from the Internet. This image is the most important visual representation of that word, at that time, according to the current Internet authority Google. Finally, the individual images are incorporated into a new context, creating a new tense state of meaning and random relations. With “Zapmachine: Who gave you the right?” AbFab is asking the following questions:

-How much control do we have over the generated collage as artists?
-How much influence do you have on this process.
-How does the collage relate to the initial intention by which the image was uploaded on the Internet by the original author?
-Who is the author of this Zap collage?

Disease Disco (Constant Dullaart) “To every suffering its thumbnail”. Dullaart used the Google image search by color option, to query the word ‘disease’ and changes color ‘rhytmically’. The work is accompanied by the US billboard #1 hit song of the moment that the work was created.

The Global Anxiety Monitor (De Geuzen) uses html-frames to display automated image searches in different languages. Searching in Google for terms such as conflict, terrorism and climate change, this monitor traces the ebb and flow of fear in Arabic, Hebrew, English and Dutch.

Terms & Conditions

Cookie Monster (Andrea Fiore) To capture on-line behavior, thousands of HTTP cookies are sent daily to web browsers to identify users and gather statistical knowledge about tastes and habits. The cookie consensus website hosts a collection of cookies that Andrea Fiore received while surfing through the first 50 entries of the Alexa directory of News sites. In the future it will also host a software that will give the users the capability to create their own cookie collections.

I Love Alaska (Lernert Engelberts & Sander Plug) is a beautifully framed internet movie series that tells the story of a middle aged woman living in Houston, Texas. The viewer follows her AOL search queries over the time span of months. “In the end, when she cheats on her husband with a man she met online, her life seems to crumble around her. She regrets her deceit, admits to her Internet addiction and dreams of a new life in Alaska.”

Flarf poetry can be characterized as an avant-garde poetry movement of the late 20th and the early 21st century. In flarf poetry a poet roams the Internet using random word searches, to distill newly created phrases and bizarre constructions that he later shares with the flarf community.

Flarf poetry can be described as a ‘readymade’, collage technique that has connections to the Surrealists in the 20s and William Burroughs cut-up technique from 1959. Flarf itself exists for a decade and has since then evolved by using web poetry generators and chatbots like Jabberwacky.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is my Readymade Flarf poem using Jabberwacky:

What is Flarf? The greatest two dimensional thing in the world. What is Flarf? A Flatland. It’s a satire on this one.

Although my self made poem doesn’t show this so well (I am unfortunately an amateur flarf poet), flarf poems are often as disturbing as they are hilarious, which have made many people question if flarf will can ever be taken serious. Even though this question is still a valid question today, the movement is showing signs to have cleared a spot amongst the ranks of the legitimate art forms, finding its ways to blogs, magazines and conferences.

You can find them here:

with:public “Notes on Society of the Query”

The “how” attitude, an attitude which will bring you to media literacy, is, as the Ippolita Collective explains, a convivial model. As opposed to the industrial model of productivity, the convivial model implies maintaining autonomy, creativity and personal freedom in interaction with individuals or technology. How would one build up this model of conviviality? The answer, according to the artistic and research group is to build convivial tools! A convivial tool is not something that you can purchase but something that you have to build yourself in order to have it match your own needs. It is something that you enjoy creating, like making your own wiki.

Can the convivial attitude be applied in approaching our Google/ digital rights/ privacy issues? The Ippolita Collective already has, and the result is a tool named SCookies which you can download for free here. The application takes its slogan, “Share your Cookies!” literally and mixes your cookies with the cookies of other individuals who have installed it, in order to alter your profile and render it unreliable. While it may not be the solution, the SCookies application is emblematic of a style, an attitude of approaching an issue such as digital civil rights.

The Ippolita Collective has recently finished a book on Google, The Dark Side of Google, which you can download for free from their website.

The essay and presentation of the Italian media theorist and critic focused on an alternative direction for research in the field of critical Internet/ Google studies. He proposed a shift of focus from Google’s power and monopoly and the associated critique in Foucauldian fashion developed within fields such as surveillance studies, to the “political economy of the PageRank algorithm.” According to Pasquinelli, the PageRank algorithm is the base of Google’s power and an emblematic and effective diagram for cognitive capitalism.

Google’s PageRank algorithm determines the value of a website according to the number of inlinks received by a webpage. The algorithm was inspired by the academic publications’ citation system, in which the value of an academic publication is determined by the number of quotations received by the journal’s articles. Pasquinelli takes this algorithm as a starting point in order to introduce into critical studies the notion of “network surplus-value,” a notion inspired by Guatarri’s notion of “machinic surplus value.”

The Google PageRank diagram is the most effective diagram of the cognitive economy because it makes visible precisely this aspect characteristic of the cognitive economy, namely network value. Network value adds up to the more established notions of commodity use value and exchange value. Network value refers to the circulation value of a commodity. The pollination metaphor used by the first speaker, Yann Moulier Boutang, is useful in understanding network value. Each one of us as “click workers” contributes to the production and accumulation of network value, which is further being embedded in lucrative activities, such as Google’s advertising model. While in the knowledge economy a particular emphasis is placed on intellectual property, the notion of cognitive rent to which Matteo Pasquinelli draws attention becomes useful here. Google as “rentier of the common intellect” refers to the way in which free content produced with the free labour of individuals browsing the internet is being indexed by Google and used in profit generating activities.  From this perspective Pasquinelli challenges Lessing’s notion of “free culture” in that Google offers a platform and certain services for free, but each one of us contributes to the Google business when performing a search, data which is being fed into the page ranking algorithm. The use of the notion of common intellect or collective intelligence in this context is however debatable, as shown in the discussion session which followed the presentation, because there is only a certain relatively limited segment of individuals – the users which contribute content to the web – , whose linking activity is being fed into the PageRank algorithm. The prominence of the PageRank algorithm as generator of network value has also been questioned, as the algorithm is not the only ranking instrument. As the posting on Henk van Ess’ website shows, human evaluators also participate in page ranking.

What is there to be done about Google’s accumulation of value by means of exploitation of the common intellect? Or to use Pasquinelli’s metaphor, are there alternatives to Google’s parasitizing of the collective production of knowledge? How can this value be re-appropriated? As the speaker suggested, perhaps through voluntary hand made indexing of the web? Or an open page rank algorithm? Or perhaps a trust rank? This question is still open.

Hoboken is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam, writing his dissertation about search engines and freedom of expression. His research investigates the impact of legal norms on the users’ freedom, and today at The Society of the Query he focused on the question, “Does privacy still exist in an environment of search.”

Accessing Our Data From Search Engines
Hoboken rightfully admitted that most users have a lack of knowledge about data protection. Corporations behind popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and AOL are storing a plethora of user data (query logs, IP, time, cookies etc), and what most people don’t know is that EU law grants users “the right to access any personal data stored about them.”

For example, Article 12 (European Union Directive 95/46/EC) reads, “Member States shall guarantee every data subject the right to obtain from the controller: [...] knowledge of the logic involved in any automatic processing of data concerning him. [...] When applied specifically to search engines, users must have the right to access any personal data stored about them.” Which brings Hoboken to the question: why are we so passive in enforcing these rights?

Exercising Our Rights To Our Data
In 2006 AOL purposefully released 20 million partially anonymized search queries. Hoboken reminded us of how seemingly innocuous data can be pieced together and traced back to our identifies, as was the case with AOL user #4417749 who, based on the content of her web queries, was later identified as 62-year old widow Thelma Arnold. Online you exist as a number, but data is never completely anonymized. Hoboken laments, “AOL thought it would be good for researchers, and it’s a bit unfortunate that the backlash from this experiment means that it is now much harder for the public to get a hold of search data. Search data that is important for scholars to do do research.”

Although there are opportunities for accessing this information, the application of law sometimes falls short. Hoboken lists three problems that we run into when attempting to access our data from search engines, “These companies are opaque, divorced from reality, and they advocate data storage with reference to repressive purposes.” In his presentation he points to examples of these problems echoed in  Google’s retention policy and in an NPR with Google co-founder Eric Schmidt (see slides * coming soon).

“We really have to worry about the extended amount of data being stored,” says Hoboken, “but fortunately there are many laws already established to protect us and our data.” He challenges us to take advantage of these laws and to ask more questions. And while it may not be possible to anatomize the data being collected, the fate of online privacy lies in our understanding of these laws and in our ability to exercise the rights that will protect our data from being (ab)used.

[slideshare id=2509525&doc=jorisvanhoboken091113jvhslidessocietyofthequery-091116045911-phpapp01]

Are we all just worker bees being exploited by Google for capitalistic means?

Google has become the emblem of cognitive capitalism because it has invented a new economic model relying on the controlled development of collective intelligence networks. French socio-economist Yann Moulier Boutang explored the dependency of Google (as a factory for the commodization of knowledge) on human querying (as labor).

“You are working for Google! Every second, 15 million people are clicking and feeding data to Google – a true paradigm of people working for the firm,” explains Boutang. What Google is selling is not an ordinary service, but a meta-service, one that depends on human contribution. He likens this human activity to that of the worker bee, and the economy of Google is dependent on the pollination of these bees. Boutang further illustrates the analogy by looking at the habits of beekeepers, “Beekeepers in the U.S. are no longer making their living by selling wax or honey. They are selling the bee’s activity: they rent their service of pollination.”

Boutang surmises that Google’s new economic model may be reshaping capitalism into -  what he refers to as – a “meta-market”. In this type of market knowledge is recognized as a public, non-rival good that can be easily transferred through the network. The marketable asset here goes beyond cognitive capitalism (where the pure input/output of an immaterial asset is commodified) by establishing a new market based on the meta-data culled form  “human pollination”.

In conclusion Boutang asks, “Is it possible to free the clickworker from Google?” Boutang seems uncertain, but ultimately he believes that “an imitation Google”, an open-source or publicly owned knowledge engine,  would be the last hope for freeing the bees from the beekeeper.

Although claims about China’s violation of human rights seem unquestionable, it is ultimately a political and social issue and not a technological one. Basing arguments about Chinese repressive practices on accessibility to Google search result, or more generally, what is presented in the search results, is problematic and fails to look at what Google is. The nature of Google’s search results is based on popularity vote and thus can be seen as a reflection of the implicit recommendation of the dominant Web users. Although Google’s algorithm has often been heralded as democratic, receiving dominance through number of inlinks (also referred to as votes), not all sources are treated equal; a link, although being a popularity vote, does not necessarily mean an agreement on principles. For most part of the Web’s history the dominant users on the Web were western users, and thus what is reflected in the Google search results might not be a reflection of Chinese users and their opinions. If it was, it might be insightful to think about whether criticism about Tiananmen Square would surface if the search results included all the voices of the Chinese users. Maybe more importantly in relation to the Chinese identity, would the majority of the user like to have such a national drama be represented on the top of the Google results, for the entire world to see? What does it say about the state of local social and political issues when they are not reflected in a global publishing platform such as Google?

These questions are hard to answer, but what is clear is that at this point in time the voices of the Chinese users might not be represented equally in the search results. Partially this is due to the fact the Chinese user, although large in numbers, is still the new kid on the block. Another reason is that not all voices are heard, not all the different views on reality are being allowed a place in the online debate. But assuming for the moment that Google would be able to operate the way they think is best, operating according to their mission statement, would those voices be reflected in the search results? Keeping the analysis close to home, the question could become whether or not the search results we encounter are a reflection all our voices.

Richard Rogers in ‘The Googlization Question, and the Inculpable Engine’, looked at the search results for queries concerning important western political and social issues and found that rather then providing a collision space of alternate account of realty, something you might expect in a democratic society, Google furnished the familiar, it literally returns what you would expect. The search results follow mainstream storylines, issues raised in mainstream media, who have been repeated frequently on television, made up the top of search engine results. For Rogers Google is a status-authoring device and explains that:

Given all the pages that do reference a key word, the search engine delivers those ‘deserving’ to be listed as the top sources. Thus, apart from seeing the source set as the story, one also may view the engine results as telling a second kind of story — the current status of the topic or issue in question through the organizations currently representing it, on the record, in the engine returns.

Seeing the Google search engine as producing information that represents the diverse sets of opinions needed for true democratic debate (if we for the moment assume this is at all possible through media) thus ignores the way the technology operates. It is not so much Google search engine serving a misleading presentation of facts, but more so a misunderstanding of what it is. The search results are returning exactly what could be expected and the service works just fine. In a media saturated environment it should not be surprising that what is reflected in a service based on popularity votes is a reflection of issues and opinions brought up by the dominant media. Given the dominance of mainstream media in the Google results it seems a plausible assumption that a similar situation would occur in China. Given that the mainstream media operate under the same self-censorship regulations as Google.ch has to abide to, a free Google might change less then one might assume. In the act of trying to free the Chinese people from the oppressive governmental censorship, western users might be loosing sight on how their own system is reproducing biased narratives or at least return only a selection of a very particular reality.

In the article previously re-posted here, Clive Thompson from the New York Times spoke to a Internet executive highlighting the “distorted universe” the west believe the Chinese people are being presented and wonders:

What happens to people’s worldviews when they do a Google search for Falun Gong and almost exclusively find sites opposed to it, as would happen today on google.cn? Perhaps they would trust Google’s authority and assume there is nothing to be found.

Thompson reflects on this and states:

Perhaps the distorted universe is less of a problem in China, because — as many Chinese citizens told me — the Chinese people long ago learned to read past the distortions of Communist propaganda and media control.

What happens when we read Thompson’s conclusion slightly different? What if the western faith in technology and information, in the belief that the information returned are all the voices, that universal access to al information will change complicated social issues, have made us more blind to the constructedness of our own reality then the Chinese to theirs? In the act of trying to free a country of its oppressive regime by providing them access to information, we assume they are blind to something they have been accustomed to for decades and ignore our own blindness.

Let’s stop searching and start questioning…

On his Working Notes Blog, Ben Peters has written an excellent post about Darntons Harvard lecture. Peters, Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School and doctoral candidate at Columbia University studies the way the concept of information changes over time, technologies and societies, with an emphasis on Eastern Europe and America. In his lecture review, he highlights Darntons passion for the literary history of French Enlightenment and his long career in studying books, sketching the image of an “archetypal figure in a new class of open-source advocates: a mix of established man of letters and one who takes delight in slightly perverse and totally public revolution”.

Read Ben Peters’ post here:
http://www.columbia.edu/~bjp2108/blog

Google & the Future of Books on the New York Review of Books:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281

Google’s China Problem (and China’s Google Problem)

Author: Clive Thompson
source: New York Times

For many young people in China, Kai-Fu Lee is a celebrity. Not quite on the level of a movie star like Edison Chen or the singers in the boy band F4, but for a 44-year-old computer scientist who invariably appears in a somber dark suit, he can really draw a crowd. When Lee, the new head of operations for Google in China, gave a lecture at one Chinese university about how young Chinese should compete with the rest of the world, scalpers sold tickets for $60 apiece. At another, an audience of 8,000 showed up; students sprawled out on the ground, fixed on every word.

It is not hard to see why Lee has become a cult figure for China’s high-tech youth. He grew up in Taiwan, went to Columbia and Carnegie-Mellon and is fluent in both English and Mandarin. Before joining Google last year, he worked for Apple in California and then for Microsoft in China; he set up Microsoft Research Asia, the company’s research-and-development lab in Beijing. In person, Lee exudes the cheery optimism of a life coach; last year, he published “Be Your Personal Best,” a fast-selling self-help book that urged Chinese students to adopt the risk-taking spirit of American capitalism. When he started the Microsoft lab seven years ago, he hired dozens of China’s top graduates; he will now be doing the same thing for Google. “The students of China are remarkable,” he told me when I met him in Beijing in February. “There is a huge desire to learn.”

Lee can sound almost evangelical when he talks about the liberating power of technology. The Internet, he says, will level the playing field for China’s enormous rural underclass; once the country’s small villages are connected, he says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves. Lee has been with Google since only last summer, but he wears the company’s earnest, utopian ethos on his sleeve: when he was hired away from Microsoft, he published a gushingly emotional open letter on his personal Web site, praising Google’s mission to bring information to the masses. He concluded with an exuberant equation that translates as “youth + freedom + equality + bottom-up innovation + user focus + don’t be evil = The Miracle of Google.”

When I visited with Lee, that miracle was being conducted out of a collection of bland offices in downtown Beijing that looked as if they had been hastily rented and occupied. The small rooms were full of eager young Chinese men in hip sweatshirts clustered around enormous flat-panel monitors, debugging code for new Google projects. “The ideals that we uphold here are really just so important and noble,” Lee told me. “How to build stuff that users like, and figure out how to make money later. And ‘Don’t Do Evil’ ” — he was referring to Google’s bold motto, “Don’t Be Evil” — “all of those things. I think I’ve always been an idealist in my heart.”

Yet Google’s conduct in China has in recent months seemed considerably less than idealistic. In January, a few months after Lee opened the Beijing office, the company announced it would be introducing a new version of its search engine for the Chinese market. To obey China’s censorship laws, Google’s representatives explained, the company had agreed to purge its search results of any Web sites disapproved of by the Chinese government, including Web sites promoting Falun Gong, a government-banned spiritual movement; sites promoting free speech in China; or any mention of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. If you search for “Tibet” or “Falun Gong” most anywhere in the world on google.com, you’ll find thousands of blog entries, news items and chat rooms on Chinese repression. Do the same search inside China on google.cn, and most, if not all, of these links will be gone. Google will have erased them completely.

Google’s decision did not go over well in the United States. In February, company executives were called into Congressional hearings and compared to Nazi collaborators. The company’s stock fell, and protesters waved placards outside the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google wasn’t the only American high-tech company to run aground in China in recent months, nor was it the worst offender. But Google’s executives were supposed to be cut from a different cloth. When the company went public two years ago, its telegenic young founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, wrote in the company’s official filing for the Securities and Exchange Commission that Google is “a company that is trustworthy and interested in the public good.” How could Google square that with making nice with a repressive Chinese regime and the Communist Party behind it?

It was difficult for me to know exactly how Lee felt about the company’s arrangement with China’s authoritarian leadership. As a condition of our meeting, Google had demanded that I not raise the issue of government relations; only the executives in Google’s California head office were allowed to discuss those matters. But as Lee and I talked about how the Internet was transforming China, he offered one opinion that seemed telling: the Chinese students he meets and employs, Lee said, do not hunger for democracy. “People are actually quite free to talk about the subject,” he added, meaning democracy and human rights in China. “I don’t think they care that much. I think people would say: ‘Hey, U.S. democracy, that’s a good form of government. Chinese government, good and stable, that’s a good form of government. Whatever, as long as I get to go to my favorite Web site, see my friends, live happily.’ ” Certainly, he said, the idea of personal expression, of speaking out publicly, had become vastly more popular among young Chinese as the Internet had grown and as blogging and online chat had become widespread. “But I don’t think of this as a political statement at all,” Lee said. “I think it’s more people finding that they can express themselves and be heard, and they love to keep doing that.”

It sounded to me like company spin — a curiously deflated notion of free speech. But spend some time among China’s nascent class of Internet users, as I have these past months, and you begin to hear such talk somewhat differently. Youth + freedom + equality + don’t be evil is an equation with few constants and many possible solutions. What is freedom, just now, to the Chinese? Are there gradations of censorship, better and worse ways to limit information? In America, that seems like an intolerable question — the end of the conversation. But in China, as Google has discovered, it is just the beginning.

Cultural Differences

Google was not, in fact, a pioneer in China. Yahoo was the first major American Internet company to enter the market, introducing a Chinese-language version of its site and opening up an office in Beijing in 1999. Yahoo executives quickly learned how difficult China was to penetrate — and how baffling the country’s cultural barriers can be for Americans. Chinese businesspeople, for example, rarely rely on e-mail, because they find the idea of leaving messages to be socially awkward. They prefer live exchanges, which means they gravitate to mobile phones and short text messages instead. (They avoid voicemail for the same reason; during the weeks I traveled in China, whenever I called a Chinese executive whose phone was turned off, I would get a recording saying that the person was simply “unavailable,” and the phone would not accept messages.) The most popular feature of the Internet for Chinese users — much more so than in the United States — is the online discussion board, where long, rollicking arguments and flame wars spill on for thousands of comments. Baidu, a Chinese search engine that was introduced in 2001 as an early competitor to Yahoo, capitalized on the national fervor for chat and invented a tool that allows people to create instant discussion groups based on popular search queries. When users now search on baidu.com for the name of the Chinese N.B.A. star Yao Ming, for example, they are shown not only links to news reports on his games; they are also able to join a chat room with thousands of others and argue about him. Baidu’s chat rooms receive as many as five million posts a day.

As Yahoo found, these cultural nuances made the sites run by American companies feel simply foreign to Chinese users — and drove them instead to local portals designed by Chinese entrepreneurs. These sites, including Sina.com and Sohu.com, had less useful search engines, but they were full of links to chat rooms and government-approved Chinese-language news sites. Nationalist feelings might have played a role, too, in the success Chinese-run sites enjoyed at Yahoo’s expense. “There’s now a very strong sense of pride in supporting the local guy,” I was told by Andrew Lih, a Chinese-American professor of media studies at the University of Hong Kong.

Yahoo also was slow to tap into another powerful force in Chinese life: rampant piracy. In most parts of the West, after the Napster wars, movie and music piracy is increasingly understood as an illicit activity; it thrives, certainly, but there is now a stigma against taking too much intellectual content without paying for it. (Hence the success of iTunes.) In China, downloading illegal copies of music, movies and software is as normal and accepted as checking the weather online. Baidu’s executives discovered early on that many young users were using the Internet to hunt for pirated MP3′s, so the company developed an easy-to-use interface specifically for this purpose. When I sat in an Internet cafe in Beijing one afternoon, a teenager with mutton-chop sideburns a few chairs over from me sipped a Coke and watched a samurai movie he’d downloaded free, while his friends used Baidu to find and pull down pirated tracks from the 50 Cent album “Get Rich or Die Tryin’.” Almost one-fifth of Baidu’s traffic comes from searching for unlicensed MP3′s that would be illegal in the United States. Robin Li, Baidu’s 37-year-old founder and C.E.O., is unrepentant. “Right now I think that the record companies may not be happy about the service we are offering,” he told me recently, “but I think digital music as a trend is unstoppable.”

At first, Google took a different approach to the Chinese market than Yahoo did. In early 2000, Google’s engineers quietly set about creating a version of their search engine that could understand character-based Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. By the end of the year, they had put up a clunky but serviceable Chinese-language version of Google’s home page. If you were in China and surfed over to google.com in 2001, Google’s servers would automatically detect that you were inside the country and send you to the Chinese-language search interface, much in the same way google.com serves up a French-language interface to users in France.

While Baidu appealed to young MP3 hunters, Google became popular with a different set: white-collar urban professionals in the major Chinese cities, aspirational types who follow Western styles and sprinkle English words into conversation, a class that prides itself on being cosmopolitan rather than nationalistic. By pulling in that audience, Google by the end of 2002 achieved a level of success that had eluded Yahoo: it amassed an estimated 25 percent of all search traffic in China — and it did so working entirely from California, far outside the Chinese government’s sphere of influence.

The Great Firewall

Then on Sept. 3, 2002, Google vanished. Chinese workers arrived at their desks to find that Google’s site was down, with just an error page in its place. The Chinese government had begun blocking it. China has two main methods for censoring the Web. For companies inside its borders, the government uses a broad array of penalties and threats to keep content clean. For Web sites that originate anywhere else in the world, the government has another impressively effective mechanism of control: what techies call the Great Firewall of China.

When you use the Internet, it often feels placeless and virtual, but it’s not. It runs on real wires that cut through real geographical boundaries. There are three main fiber-optic pipelines in China, giant underground cables that provide Internet access for the public and connect China to the rest of the Internet outside its borders. The Chinese government requires the private-sector companies that run these fiber-optic networks to specially configure “router” switches at the edge of the network, where signals cross into foreign countries. These routers — some of which are made by Cisco Systems, an American firm — serve as China’s new censors.

If you log onto a computer in downtown Beijing and try to access a Web site hosted on a server in Chicago, your Internet browser sends out a request for that specific Web page. The request travels over one of the Chinese pipelines until it hits the routers at the border, where it is then examined. If the request is for a site that is on the government’s blacklist — and there are lots of them — it won’t get through. If the site isn’t blocked wholesale, the routers then examine the words in the requested page’s Internet address for blacklisted terms. If the address contains a word like “falun” or even a coded term like “198964″ (which Chinese dissidents use to signify June 4, 1989, the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), the router will block the signal. Back in the Internet cafe, your browser will display an error message. The filters can be surprisingly sophisticated, allowing certain pages from a site to slip through while blocking others. While I sat at one Internet cafe in Beijing, the government’s filters allowed me to surf the entertainment and sports pages of the BBC but not its news section.

Google posed a unique problem for the censors: Because the company had no office at the time inside the country, the Chinese government had no legal authority over it — no ability to demand that Google voluntarily withhold its search results from Chinese users. And the firewall only half-worked in Google’s case: it could block sites that Google pointed to, but in some cases it would let slip through a list of search results that included banned sites. So if you were in Shanghai and you searched for “human rights in China” on google.com, you would get a list of search results that included Human Rights in China (hrichina.org), a New York-based organization whose Web site is banned by the Chinese government. But if you tried to follow the link to hrichina.org, you would get nothing but an error message; the firewall would block the page. You could see that the banned sites existed, in other words, but you couldn’t reach them. Government officials didn’t like this situation — Chinese citizens were receiving constant reminders that their leaders felt threatened by certain subjects — but Google was popular enough that they were reluctant to block it entirely.

In 2002, though, something changed, and the Chinese government decided to shut down all access to Google. Why? Theories abound. Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, whose responsibilities include government relations, told me that he suspects the block might have been at the instigation of a competitor — one of its Chinese rivals. Brin is too diplomatic to accuse anyone by name, but various American Internet executives told me they believe that Baidu has at times benefited from covert government intervention. A young Chinese-American entrepreneur in Beijing told me that she had heard that the instigator of the Google blockade was Baidu, which in 2002 had less than 3 percent of the search market compared with Google’s 24 percent. “Basically, some Baidu people sat down and did hundreds of searches for banned materials on Google,” she said. (Like many Internet businesspeople I spoke with in China, she asked to remain anonymous, fearing retribution from the authorities.) “Then they took all the results, printed them up and went to the government and said, ‘Look at all this bad stuff you can find on Google!’ That’s why the government took Google offline.” Baidu strongly denies the charge, and when I spoke to Guo Liang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, he dismissed the idea and argued that Baidu is simply a stronger competitor than Google, with a better grasp of Chinese desires. Still, many Beijing high-tech insiders told me that it is common for domestic Internet firms to complain to the government about the illicit content of competitors, in the hope that their rivals will suffer the consequences. In China, the censorship regime is not only a political tool; it is also a competitive one — a cudgel that private firms use to beat one another with.

Self-Discipline Awards

When I visited a dingy Internet cafe one November evening in Beijing, its 120 or so cubicles were crammed with teenagers. (Because computers and home Internet connections are so expensive, many of China’s mostly young Internet users go online in these cafes, which charge mere pennies per hour and provide fast broadband — and cold soft drinks.) Everyone in the cafe looked to be settled in for a long evening of lightweight entertainment: young girls in pink and yellow Hello Kitty sweaters juggled multiple chat sessions, while upstairs a gang of young Chinese soldiers in olive-drab coats laughed as they crossed swords in the medieval fantasy game World of Warcraft. On one wall, next to a faded kung-fu movie poster, was a yellow sign that said, in Chinese characters, “Do not go to pornographic or illegal Web sites.” The warning seemed almost beside the point; nobody here looked even remotely likely to be hunting for banned Tiananmen Square retrospectives. I asked the cafe manager, a man with huge aviator glasses and graying hair, how often his clients try to view illegal content. Not often, he said with a chuckle, and when they do, it’s usually pornography. He said he figured it was the government’s job to keep banned materials inaccessible. “If it’s not supposed to be seen,” he said, “it’s not supposed to be seen.”

One mistake Westerners frequently make about China is to assume that the government is furtive about its censorship. On the contrary, the party is quite matter of fact about it — proud, even. One American businessman who would speak only anonymously told me the story of attending an award ceremony last year held by the Internet Society of China for Internet firms, including the major Internet service providers. “I’m sitting there in the audience for this thing,” he recounted, “and they say, ‘And now it’s time to award our annual Self-Discipline Awards!’ And they gave 10 companies an award. They gave them a plaque. They shook hands. The minister was there; he took his picture with each guy. It was basically like Excellence in Self-Censorship — and everybody in the audience is, like, clapping.” Internet censorship in China, this businessman explained, is presented as a benevolent police function. In January, the Shenzhen Public Security Bureau created two cuddly little anime-style cartoon “Internet Police” mascots named “Jingjing” and “Chacha”; each cybercop has a blog and a chat window where Chinese citizens can talk to them. As a Shenzhen official candidly told The Beijing Youth Daily, “The main function of Jingjing and Chacha is to intimidate.” The article went on to explain that the characters are there “to publicly remind all Netizens to be conscious of safe and healthy use of the Internet, self-regulate their online behavior and maintain harmonious Internet order together.”

Intimidation and “self-regulation” are, in fact, critical to how the party communicates its censorship rules to private-sector Internet companies. To be permitted to offer Internet services, a private company must sign a license agreeing not to circulate content on certain subjects, including material that “damages the honor or interests of the state” or “disturbs the public order or destroys public stability” or even “infringes upon national customs and habits.” One prohibition specifically targets “evil cults or superstition,” a clear reference to Falun Gong. But the language is, for the most part, intentionally vague. It leaves wide discretion for any minor official in China’s dozens of regulatory agencies to demand that something he finds offensive be taken offline.

Government officials from the State Council Information Office convene weekly meetings with executives from the largest Internet service companies — particularly major portals that run news stories and host blogs and discussion boards — to discuss what new topics are likely to emerge that week that the party would prefer be censored. “It’s known informally as the ‘wind-blowing meeting’ — in other words, which way is the wind blowing,” the American businessman told me. The government officials provide warnings for the days ahead, he explained. “They say: ‘There’s this party conference going on this week. There are some foreign dignitaries here on this trip.’ ”

American Internet firms typically arrive in China expecting the government to hand them an official blacklist of sites and words they must censor. They quickly discover that no master list exists. Instead, the government simply insists the firms interpret the vague regulations themselves. The companies must do a sort of political mind reading and intuit in advance what the government won’t like. Last year, a list circulated online purporting to be a blacklist of words the government gives to Chinese blogging firms, including “democracy” and “human rights.” In reality, the list had been cobbled together by a young executive at a Chinese blog company. Every time he received a request to take down a posting, he noted which phrase the government had objected to, and after a while he developed his own list simply to help his company avoid future hassles.

The penalty for noncompliance with censorship regulations can be serious. An American public-relations consultant who recently worked for a major domestic Chinese portal recalled an afternoon when Chinese police officers burst into the company’s offices, dragged the C.E.O. into a conference room and berated him for failing to block illicit content. “He was pale with fear afterward,” she said. “You have to understand, these people are terrified, just terrified. They’re seriously worried about slipping up and going to jail. They think about it every day they go into the office.”

As a result, Internet executives in China most likely censor far more material than they need to. The Chinese system relies on a classic psychological truth: self-censorship is always far more comprehensive than formal censorship. By having each private company assume responsibility for its corner of the Internet, the government effectively outsources the otherwise unmanageable task of monitoring the billions of e-mail messages, news stories and chat postings that circulate every day in China. The government’s preferred method seems to be to leave the companies guessing, then to call up occasionally with angry demands that a Web page be taken down in 24 hours. “It’s the panopticon,” says James Mulvenon, a China specialist who is the head of a Washington policy group called the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis. “There’s a randomness to their enforcement, and that creates a sense that they’re looking at everything.”

The government’s filtering, while comprehensive, is not total. One day a banned site might temporarily be visible, if the routers are overloaded — or if the government suddenly decides to tolerate it. The next day the site might disappear again. Generally, everyday Internet users react with caution. They rarely push the government’s limits. There are lines that cannot be crossed, and without actually talking about it much, everyone who lives and breathes Chinese culture understands more or less where those lines are. This is precisely what makes the environment so bewildering to American Internet companies. What’s allowed? What’s not allowed?

In contrast to the confusion most Americans experience, Chinese businessmen would often just laugh when I asked whether the government’s censorship regime was hard to navigate. “I’ll tell you this, it’s not more hard than dealing with Sarbanes and Oxley,” said Xin Ye, a founding executive of Sohu.com, one of China’s biggest Yahoo-like portals. (He was referring to the American law that requires publicly held companies to report in depth on their finances.) Another evening I had drinks in a Shanghai jazz bar with Charles Chao, the president of Sina, the country’s biggest news site. When I asked him how often he needs to remove postings from the discussion boards on Sina.com, he said, “It’s not often.” I asked if that meant once a week, once a month or less often; he demurred. “I don’t think I can talk about it,” he said. Yet he seemed less annoyed than amused by my line of questioning. “I don’t want to call it censorship,” he said. “It’s like in every country: they have a bias. There are taboos you can’t talk about in the U.S., and everyone knows it.”

Jack Ma put it more bluntly: “We don’t want to annoy the government.” Ma is the hyperkinetic C.E.O. of Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce firm. I met him in November in the lobby of the China World Hotel in Beijing, just after Ma’s company had closed one of the biggest deals in Chinese Internet history. Yahoo, whose share of the Chinese search-engine market had fallen (according to one academic survey) to just 2.3 percent, had paid $1 billion to buy 40 percent of Alibaba and had given Ma complete control over all of Yahoo’s services in China, hoping he could do a better job with it. From his seat on a plush sofa, Ma explained Alibaba’s position on online speech. “Anything that is illegal in China — it’s not going to be on our search engine. Something that is really no good, like Falun Gong?” He shook his head in disgust. “No! We are a business! Shareholders want to make money. Shareholders want us to make the customer happy. Meanwhile, we do not have any responsibilities saying we should do this or that political thing. Forget about it!”

A Bit of a Revolution

Last fall, at a Starbucks in Beijing, I met with China’s most famous political blogger. Zhao Jing, a dapper, handsome 31-year-old in a gray sweater, seemed positively exuberant as he explained how radically China had changed since the Web arrived in the late 1990′s. Before, he said, the party controlled every single piece of media, but then Chinese began logging onto discussion boards and setting up blogs, and it was as if a bell jar had lifted. Even if you were still too cautious to talk about politics, the mere idea that you could publicly state your opinion about anything — the weather, the local sports scene — felt like a bit of a revolution.

Zhao (who now works in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times) pushed the limits further than most. After college, he took a job as a hotel receptionist in a small city. He figured that if he was lucky, he might one day own his own business. When he went online in 1998, though, he realized that what he really wanted to do was to speak out on political questions. He began writing essays and posting them on discussion boards. Soon after he started his online writing, a newspaper editor offered him a job as a reporter.

“This is what the Internet does,” Zhao said, flashing a smile. “One week after I went on the Internet, I had a reputation all over the province. I never thought I could be a writer. But I realized the problem wasn’t me — it was my small town.” Zhao lost his reporting job in March 2003 after his paper published an essay by a retired official advocating political reform; the government retaliated by shutting the paper down. Still eager to write, in December 2004 Zhao started his blog, hosted on a blogging service with servers in the U.K. His witty pro-free-speech essays, written under the name Michael Anti, were soon drawing thousands of readers a day. Last August, the government used the Great Firewall to block his site so that no one in China could read it; defiant, he switched over to Microsoft’s blogging tool, called MSN Spaces. The government was almost certainly still monitoring his work, but remarkably, he continued writing. Zhao knew he was safe, he told me, because he knew where to draw the line.

“If you talk every day online and criticize the government, they don’t care,” he said. “Because it’s just talk. But if you organize — even if it’s just three or four people — that’s what they crack down on. It’s not speech; it’s organizing. People say I’m brave, but I’m not.” The Internet brought Zhao a certain amount of political influence, yet he seemed less excited about the way his blog might transform the government and more excited about the way it had transformed his sense of himself. Several young Chinese told me the same thing. If the Internet is bringing a revolution to China, it is experienced mostly as one of self-actualization: empowerment in a thousand tiny, everyday ways.

One afternoon I visited with Jiang Jingyi, a 29-year-old Chinese woman who makes her living selling clothes on eBay. When she opened the door to her apartment in a trendy area of Shanghai, I felt as if I’d accidentally stumbled into a chic SoHo boutique. Three long racks full of puffy winter jackets and sweaters dominated the center of the living room, and neat rows of designer running shoes and boots ringed the walls. As she served me tea in a bedroom with four computers stacked on a desk, Jiang told me, through an interpreter, that she used to work as a full-time graphic designer. But she was a shopaholic, she said, and one day decided to take some of the cheap clothes she’d found at a local factory and put them up for auction online. They sold quickly, and she made a 30 percent profit. Over the next three months, she sold more and more clothes, until one one day she realized that her eBay profits were outstripping her weekly paycheck. She quit her job and began auctioning full time, and now her monthly sales are in excess of 100,000 yuan, or about $12,000.

“My parents can’t understand it,” she said with a giggle, as she clicked at the computer to show me one of her latest auctions, a winter jacket selling for 300 yuan. (Her description of the jacket translated as “Very trendy! You will look cool!”) At the moment, Jiang sells mostly to Chinese in other major cities, since China’s rudimentary banking system and the lack of a reliable credit-card network mean there is no easy way to receive payments from outside the country. But when Paypal — eBay’s online payment system — finally links the global market with the Chinese market, she says she will become a small international business, marketing cut-rate clothes directly to hipsters in London or Los Angeles.

Compromises and Disclaimers

Google never did figure out exactly why it was knocked offline in 2002 by the Chinese government. The blocking ended abruptly after two weeks, as mysteriously as it had begun. But even after being unblocked, Google still had troubles. The Great Firewall tends to slow down all traffic coming into the country from the world outside. About 15 percent of the time, Google was simply unavailable in China because of data jams. The firewall also began punishing curious minds: whenever someone inside China searched for a banned term, the firewall would often retaliate by sending back a command that tricked the user’s computer into believing Google itself had gone dead. For several minutes, the user would be unable to load Google’s search page — a digital slap on the wrist, as it were. For Google, these delays and shutdowns were a real problem, because search engines like to boast about delivering results in milliseconds. Baidu, Google’s chief Chinese-language rival, had no such problem, because its servers were located on Chinese soil and thus inside the Great Firewall. Worse, Chinese universities had virtually no access to foreign Web sites, which meant that impressionable college students — in other countries, Google’s most ardent fans — were flocking instead to Baidu.

Brin and other Google executives realized that the firewall allowed them only two choices, neither of which they relished. If Google remained aloof and continued to run its Chinese site from foreign soil, it would face slowdowns from the firewall and the threat of more arbitrary blockades — and eventually, the loss of market share to Baidu and other Chinese search engines. If it opened up a Chinese office and moved its servers onto Chinese territory, it would no longer have to fight to get past the firewall, and its service would speed up. But then Google would be subject to China’s self-censorship laws.

What eventually drove Google into China was a carrot and a stick. Baidu was the stick: by 2005, it had thoroughly whomped its competition, amassing nearly half of the Chinese search market, while Google’s market share remained stuck at 27 percent. The carrot was Google’s halcyon concept of itself, the belief that merely by improving access to information in an authoritarian country, it would be doing good. Certainly, the company’s officials figured, it could do better than the local Chinese firms, which acquiesce to the censorship regime with a shrug. Sure, Google would have to censor the most politically sensitive Web sites — religious groups, democracy groups, memorials of the Tiananmen Square massacre — along with pornography. But that was only a tiny percentage of what Chinese users search for on Google. Google could still improve Chinese citizens’ ability to learn about AIDS, environmental problems, avian flu, world markets. Revenue, Brin told me, wasn’t a big part of the equation. He said he thought it would be years before Google would make much if any profit in China. In fact, he argued, going into China “wasn’t as much a business decision as a decision about getting people information. And we decided in the end that we should make this compromise.”

He and his executives began discussing exactly which compromises they could tolerate. They decided that — unlike Yahoo and Microsoft — they would not offer e-mail or blogging services inside China, since that could put them in a position of being forced to censor blog postings or hand over dissidents’ personal information to the secret police. They also decided they would not take down the existing, unfiltered Chinese-language version of the google.com engine. In essence, they would offer two search engines in Chinese. Chinese surfers could still access the old google.com; it would produce uncensored search results, though controversial links would still lead to dead ends, and the site would be slowed down and occasionally blocked entirely by the firewall. The new option would be google.cn, where the results would be censored by Google — but would arrive quickly, reliably and unhindered by the firewall.

Brin and his team decided that if they were going to be forced to censor the results for a search for “Tiananmen Square,” then they would put a disclaimer at the top of the search results on google.cn explaining that information had been removed in accordance with Chinese law. When Chinese users search for forbidden terms, Brin said, “they can notice what’s missing, or at least notice the local control.” It is precisely the solution you’d expect from a computer scientist: the absence of information is a type of information. (Google displays similar disclaimers in France and Germany, where they strip out links to pro-Nazi Web sites.)

Brin’s team had one more challenge to confront: how to determine which sites to block? The Chinese government wouldn’t give them a list. So Google’s engineers hit on a high-tech solution. They set up a computer inside China and programmed it to try to access Web sites outside the country, one after another. If a site was blocked by the firewall, it meant the government regarded it as illicit — so it became part of Google’s blacklist.

The Google executives signed their license to become a Chinese Internet service in December 2005. They never formally sat down with government officials and received permission to put the disclaimer on censored search results. They simply decided to do it — and waited to see how the government would react.

The China Storm

Google.cn formally opened on Jan. 27 this year, and human-rights activists immediately logged onto the new engine to see how it worked. The censorship was indeed comprehensive: the first page of results for “Falun Gong,” they discovered, consisted solely of anti-Falun Gong sites. Google’s image-searching engine — which hunts for pictures — produced equally skewed results. A query for “Tiananmen Square” omitted many iconic photos of the protest and the crackdown. Instead, it produced tourism pictures of the square lighted up at night and happy Chinese couples posing before it.

Google’s timing could not have been worse. Google.cn was introduced into a political environment that was rapidly souring for American high-tech firms in China. Last September, Reporters Without Borders revealed that in 2004, Yahoo handed over an e-mail user’s personal information to the Chinese government. The user, a business journalist named Shi Tao, had used his Chinese Yahoo account to leak details of a government document on press restrictions to a pro-democracy Web site run by Chinese exiles in New York. The government sentenced him to 10 years in prison. Then in December, Microsoft obeyed a government request to delete the writings of Zhao Jing — the free-speech blogger I’d met with in the fall. What was most remarkable about this was that Microsoft’s blogging service has no servers located in China; the company effectively allowed China’s censors to reach across the ocean and erase data stored on American territory.

Against this backdrop, the Google executives probably expected to appear comparatively responsible and ethical. But instead, as the China storm swirled around Silicon Valley in February, Google bore the brunt of it. At the Congressional hearings where the three companies testified — along with Cisco, makers of hardware used in the Great Firewall — legislators assailed all the firms, but ripped into Google with particular fire. They asked how a company with the slogan “Don’t Be Evil” could conspire with China’s censors. “That makes you a functionary of the Chinese government,” said Jim Leach, an Iowa Republican. “So if this Congress wanted to learn how to censor, we’d go to you.”

Zhao Jing’s Rankings

In February, I met with Zhao Jing again, two months after his pro-democracy blog was erased by Microsoft. We ordered drinks at a faux-Irish pub in downtown Beijing. Zhao was still as energetic as ever, though he also seemed a bit rueful over his exuberant comments in our last conversation. “I’m more cynical now,” he said. His blog had been killed because of a single post. In December, a Chinese newspaper editor was fired, and Zhao called for a boycott of the paper. That apparently crossed the line. It was more than just talk; Zhao had now called for a political action. The government contacted Microsoft to demand the blog be shuttered, and the company complied — earning it a chorus of outrage from free-speech advocates in the United States, who accused Microsoft of having acted without even receiving a formal legal request from the Chinese government.

Microsoft seemed chastened by the public uproar; at the Congressional hearings, the company’s director of government relations expressed regret. To try to save face, Microsoft executives pointed out that they had saved a copy of the deleted blog postings and sent them to Zhao. What they did not mention, Zhao told me, is that they refused to e-mail Zhao the postings; they offered merely to burn them onto a CD and mail them to any address in the United States Zhao requested. Microsoft appeared to be so afraid of the Chinese government, Zhao noted with a bitter laugh, that the company would not even send the banned material into China by mail. (Microsoft declined to comment for this article.)

I expected Zhao to be much angrier with the American Internet companies than he was. He was surprisingly philosophical. He ranked the companies in order of ethics, ticking them off with his fingers. Google, he said, was at the top of the pile. It was genuinely improving the quality of Chinese information and trying to do its best within a bad system. Microsoft came next; Zhao was obviously unhappy with its decision, but he said that it had produced such an easy-to-use blogging tool that, on balance, Microsoft was helping Chinese people to speak publicly. Yahoo came last, and Zhao had nothing but venom for the company.

“Google has struck a compromise,” he said, and compromises are sometimes necessary. Yahoo’s behavior, he added, put it in a different category: “Yahoo is a sellout. Chinese people hate Yahoo.” The difference, Zhao said, was that Yahoo had put individual dissidents in serious danger and done so apparently without thinking much about the human damage. (Yahoo did not respond to requests for comment.) Google, by contrast, had avoided introducing any service that could get someone jailed. It was censoring information, but Zhao considered that a sin of omission, rather than of commission.

The Distorted Universe

Zhao’s moral calculus was striking, not least because it is so foreign to American ways of thinking. For most Americans, or certainly for most of those who think and write about China, there are no half-measures in democracy or free speech. A country either fully embraces these principles, or it disappears down the slippery slope of totalitarianism. But China’s bloggers and Internet users have already lived at the bottom of the slippery slope. From their perspective, the Internet — as filtered as it is — has already changed Chinese society profoundly. For the younger generation, especially, it has turned public speech into a daily act. This, ultimately, is the perspective that Google has adopted, too. And it raises an interesting question: Can an imperfect Internet help change a society for the better?

One Internet executive I spoke to summed up the conundrum of China’s Internet as the “distorted universe” problem. What happens to people’s worldviews when they do a Google search for Falun Gong and almost exclusively find sites opposed to it, as would happen today on google.cn? Perhaps they would trust Google’s authority and assume there is nothing to be found. This is the fear of Christopher Smith, the Republican representative who convened the recent Congressional hearings. “When Google sends you to a Chinese propaganda source on a sensitive subject, it’s got the imprimatur of Google,” he told me recently. “And that influences the next generation — they think, Maybe we can live with this dictatorship. Without your Lech Walesas, you never get democracy.” For Smith, Google’s logic is the logic of appeasement. Like the companies that sought to “engage” with apartheid South Africa, Google’s executives are too dedicated to profits ever to push for serious political change. (Earlier this month, Google’s C.E.O., Eric Schmidt, visited Kai-Fu Lee in Beijing and told journalists that it would be “arrogant” of Google to try to change China’s censorship laws.)

But perhaps the distorted universe is less of a problem in China, because — as many Chinese citizens told me — the Chinese people long ago learned to read past the distortions of Communist propaganda and media control. Guo Liang, the professor at the Chinese social sciences academy, told me about one revealing encounter. “These guys at Harvard did a study of the Chinese Internet,” Guo said. “I talked to them and asked, ‘What were your results?’ They said, ‘We think the Chinese government tries to control the Internet.’ I just laughed. I said, ‘We know that!’ ” Google’s filtering of its results was not controversial for Guo because it was nothing new.

Andrew Lih, the Chinese-American professor at the University of Hong Kong, said that many in China take a long-term perspective. “Chinese people have a 5,000-year view of history,” he said. “You ban a Web site, and they’re like: ‘Oh, give it time. It’ll come back.’ ” Or consider the position of a group of Chinese Internet geeks trying to get access to Wikipedia, the massive free online encyclopedia where anyone can write an entry. Currently, all of wikipedia.com is blocked; the group is trying to convince Wikipedia’s overseers to agree to the creation of a sanitized Chinese version with the potentially illegal entries removed. They argue that this would leave 99.9 percent of Wikipedia intact, and if that material were freely available in China, they say, it would be a great boon for China, particularly for underfinanced and isolated schools. (So far, Wikipedia has said it will not allow the creation of a censored version of the encyclopedia.)

Given how flexible computer code is, there are plenty of ways to distort the universe — to make its omissions more or less visible. At one point while developing google.cn, Google considered blocking all sites that refer to controversial topics. A search for Falun Gong in China would produce no sites in favor of it, but no sites opposing it either. What sort of effect would that have had? Remember too that when Google introduced its censored google.cn engine, it also left its original google.com Chinese-language engine online. Which means that any Chinese citizen can sit in a Net cafe, plug “Tiananmen Square” into each version of the search engine and then compare the different results — a trick that makes the blacklist somewhat visible. Critics have suggested that Google should go even further and actually publish its blacklist online in the United States, making its act of censorship entirely transparent.

The Super Girl Theory

When I spoke to Kai-Fu Lee in Google’s Beijing offices, there were moments that to me felt jarring. One minute he sounded like a freedom-loving Googler, arguing that the Internet inherently empowers its users. But the next minute he sounded more like Jack Ma of Alibaba — insisting that the Chinese have no interest in rocking the boat. It is a circular logic I encountered again and again while talking to China’s Internet executives: we don’t feel bad about filtering political results because our users aren’t looking for that stuff anyway.

They may be right about their users’ behavior. But you could just as easily argue that their users are incurious because they’re cowed. Who would openly search for illegal content in a public Internet cafe — or even at home, since the government requires that every person with personal Internet access register his name and phone number with the government for tracking purposes? It is also possible that the government’s crackdown on the Internet could become more intense if the country’s huge population of poor farmers begins agitating online. The government is reasonably tolerant of well-educated professionals online. But the farmers, upset about corrupt local officials, are serious activists, and they pose a real threat to Beijing; they staged 70,000 demonstrations in 2004, many of which the government violently suppressed.

In the eyes of critics, Google is lying to itself about the desires of Chinese Internet users and collaborating with the Communist Party merely to secure a profitable market. To take Lee at his word is to take a leap of faith: that the Internet, simply through its own inherent properties, will slowly chip away at the government’s ability to control speech, seeding a cultural change that strongly favors democracy. In this view, there will be no “great man” revolution in China, no Lech Walesa rallying his oppressed countrymen. Instead, the freedom fighters will be a half-billion mostly apolitical young Chinese, blogging and chatting about their dates, their favorite bands, video games — an entire generation that is growing up with public speech as a regular habit.

At one point in our conversation, Lee talked about the “Super Girl” competition televised in China last year, the country’s analogue to “American Idol.” Much like the American version of the show, it featured young women belting out covers of mainstream Western pop songs amid a blizzard of corporate branding. (The full title of the show was “Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Super Girl Contest,” in honor of its sponsor.) In each round, viewers could vote for their favorite competitor via text message from their mobile phones. As the season ran its course, it began to resemble a presidential election campaign, with delirious fans setting up Web sites urging voters to pick their favorite singer. In the final episode, eight million young Chinese used their mobile phones to vote; the winner was Li Yuchun, a 21-year-old who dressed like a schoolgirl and sang “Zombie,” by the Irish band the Cranberries.

“If you think about a practice for democracy, this is it,” Lee said. “People voted for Super Girls. They loved it — they went out and campaigned.” It may not be a revolution, in other words, but it might be a start.