Our goal is to change the world ", a slogan by Eric Schmid, chief executive of Google. The same Schmid that four years ago, at the opening of the search engine in Mandarin, with the local address marked by the suffix. "Cn", he declared: "We are here in China to stay there forever." Now those two statements - to change the world, stay in China - have become irreconcilable. If Google does not accept the rules of Beijing, and the complaint of local authorities, will close its Chinese adventure. The epic battle that has opened between the greatest power of the Internet and the greatest nation on the planet, is set to redefine the next few years the global architecture of the Web, the geopolitical boundaries of freedom of information, and the new concetto di sovranità nello spazio online.
Il precipitare degli eventi ha colto tutti di sorpresa, almeno in Occidente. Questo copione non è stato scritto né a Mountain View, il quartier generale di Google nella Silicon Valley californiana, né tanto meno a Washington nelle sedi del potere politico. Negli scenari più pessimisti elaborati dal Pentagono, quando due anni fa l'Esercito Popolare di Liberazione centrò in pieno un proprio satellite in un test di guerre stellari, fu detto che la conquista dello spazio sarebbe stata la prossima sfida tra l'America e la Cina. Nessuno aveva messo in conto quello che sta accadendo da due settimane: l'improvviso gelo tra i soci del G2 per il controllo del cyber-spazio.
Eppure quando Google lanciò la sua versione in mandarino nel 2006, la censura di Stato esisteva già. Come Microsoft, come Yahoo, come Rupert Murdoch, anche il colosso di Mountain View accettò il patto con il diavolo: collaborare con il regime facendo propri i suoi tabù, interiorizzarne i limiti alla libertà di espressione, autocensurarsi con dei filtri di software automatici approvati dalle autorità locali. Sembrava logico. Google si comportava come tante altre multinazionali "normali", separava le regole universali del business capitalistico dal contesto politico locale. Come un qualsiasi fabbricante di auto o di jeans, Schmid pensò di poter chiudere gli occhi sugli abusi contro i diritti umani, e partire alla conquista del più vasto world market. Indeed, in 2006 the question of conscience for the Americans seemed to be resolved once and for all the optimistic words of Bill Gates: "For those limitations might make the work of Microsoft, the advent of the Internet in Chinese society introduces a volume of information unprecedented. China will still be better than before, thanks to us. " At the top of Google, to be fair, not everyone thinks so. The conditions of the landing in China had strong doubts of one of the two co-founders, Sergey Brin. For his personal biography - born in the Soviet Union, immigrated to America with his parents as a child - none had sensed an incompatibility between the "nature" deep business Google and the People's Republic.
The series of conflicts between authoritarian regimes and free online has lots of precedents, from Iran to Burma. But the question is completely different when the stakes are a market of 330 million users, now the most populous. The statement condemns the Chinese government and Google responds to criticism of Hillary Clinton, makes explicit reference to the "rules of the Chinese network." No one imagines that there might be an "Internet Iran." There are only the barriers that stand in the way Tehran for local access to the network: that is one, undivided and whole. But the idea that China can organize itself as a cyber-universe independent from us, it is equally unthinkable?
In the West we take for granted for years that the Earth's surface is thoroughly explored by GoogleMap. I remember the pleasure with which I saw when I lived in San Francisco, from satellite photos that could be seen not only my home but also the plate of my car. As soon as I moved to Beijing in 2004 found that entire areas instead of the Chinese capital were blacked out, starting from the district of Zhongnanhai, where the residence of the communist nomenklatura. What appears to us natural, or inevitable, that the land mapping is done by a private American, is not acceptable to Beijing. E 'intrusion into the virtual sovereignty: a value for which the States go to war for centuries. And because of Beijing on the border that separates a giant private by the government in Washington as Google, is rather vague.
Ken Auletta, author of the essay "Googled" (the past tense of the verb "google"), notes that "few other technologies - the Gutenberg press, the telephone - have had a social revolutionary as this search engine, which has shocked our way of producing information, select it, eat it. " But the Internet was born in America, the whole organization of the world wide web has made an impression in the U.S.. Bring the unmistakable signs of a "system" rules and values \u200b\u200bborn in the U.S., by extension western, not necessarily perceived as universal in Beijing. Where we speak of "open architecture", altri capiscono "egemonia americana".
La Grande Muraglia di Fuoco, è il nome che i dissidenti hanno affibbiato alla censura online della Repubblica Popolare. E' il più moderno e sofisticato apparato di controllo dell'informazione, con almeno 15.000 tecnici informatici in servizio permanente. Eppure il governo di Pechino ha avuto bisogno fino a ieri di appoggiarsi sul "collaborazionismo" di Google, Yahoo, Microsoft. I dissidenti, o anche i giovani cinesi più curiosi e dotati per l'informatica, hanno appreso ad aggirare la Grande Muraglia. Usano metodi simili a quelli degli hacker: ad esempio per dissimularsi attraverso domicili online all'estero. Sono esattamente i metodi mutuati dai cyber-pirati al servizio del governo, nelle Google reported incursions by January 12. They have violated the privacy of Gmail e-mail of many human rights activists, as well as a large law firm in Los Angeles engaged in a lawsuit against China's state companies for copyright infringements. And they have defiled the email of 34 high-tech companies in Silicon Valley, a major episode of industrial espionage that casts a shadow on the safety of the whole Google empire.
The expert data-Holman Jenkins recalls an earlier offensive in this little known. "In the early nineties there was an escalation of incidents of piracy in the South China Sea shipping. Hong Kong, which was still a British colony, collected evidence that the pirates were in fact serving the Chinese armed forces. It was a way to reclaim the sovereignty of Beijing on routes of strategic communication. "Cyber-pirates that China has unleashed on Google, sparking a conflict that led to the intervention until the Obama Administration, they would like playing a game. How the pirate Francis Drake in the service of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I against the English empire. Up for grabs this time there is a virtual space, even more strategic maritime routes. China aims very high, if he felt the need to intimidate Google to question the privacy of its industrial clients: all now potentially bugged. The leaders of the People's Republic can imagine a third of the Treaty of Yalta millennium, with which America takes notice of their sovereignty over a part of the Internet. If you pass their plan, the visionary speech by Hillary Clinton who has praised the Internet as "the great Equalizer," applies only to the side of the Great Wall.
Federico Rampini
www.repubblica.it
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