Jin Cuodao, senior writer for Beijing-based Digitimes, told reporters from Sina.com that no other company understands the essence of a search engine better than Google and its bottleneck in China is localization. He said the core of Google’s localization is to restore its general searching nature in China, where most of its users use Google specifically for non-entertainment-related purposes.

Lu Bowang, a senior IT analyst and consultant at China Internet Network Information Center, pointed to fraud as Google’s biggest problem. He suggests that Google should find a way to deal with the thousands of rogue ad agents, who don’t pay them a cent and harm the company’s credibility in the marketplace.

If Kai-Fu Lee could register them, then these fraudulent agents could bring in big profits for Google China, as they know the local market and could promote Google’s AdWords, Lu told Beijing Review.

Explaining Google’s drop in performance over the last year, Lu said there was another side to the story. According to a survey Lu hosted in the first half of 2005, Google remained the most popular search engine among non-student users, an audience with more spending power, yet the company is not taking profitability as its top priority right now.

From the perspective of an ordinary Internet searcher, Lu said his experience with Google’s Chinese services is more pleasant than that with Baidu. The latter adopts a search advertising monetization model that always places the paid placement links above search results without marking them as sponsored links. This could run to as many as three pages. Lu believes Baidu’s practice is disingenuous, which would be found out by users sooner or later.

“In contrast, Google has all the sponsored links marked, either under a column on the right or in a different color at the top,” Lu said.

Adhering to local requirements

Different from Yahoo, which moved all its Chinese service servers to China in 2005, Google has yet to install a server in China. But this makes no difference to the censorship standards between Yahoo and Google or any local Internet company. The same censorship rules apply to all players.

An anonymous source from China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), China’s official Internet industry association, told Beijing Review that content of websites supported by servers stationed abroad has to be monitored by China’s firewall before reaching Chinese audiences and websites with servers stationed in China are required to conduct self-censorship according to government regulations.

The source also said Chinese Internet censorship agencies closely monitor the content of domestic websites and punishment, including the suspension of operating licenses, could be meted out to those breaking the law.

Therefore, when Google officially launched its Google.cn website January 23 and added a warning message below the search bar in Chinese that read: “According to local law and policy, some search results are not displayed,” it was in keeping with the local requirements, said the CNNIC source.

Answering questions at a press conference in March, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said, “Internet monitoring is an internationally common practice and China attaches a great deal of importance to attracting international experience in Internet monitoring.”

Asked about the procedures for filtering information online, an anonymous official from the Internet Society of China declined to give Beijing Review any comment on this question. He did say that, “Many countries in the world, including the United States, are monitoring and screening the content of the Internet.”

Xie Xinzhou, professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University, specializes in studies of new media. He has been working on a project of national comparative studies of management mechanisms for the Internet. He told Beijing Review that monitoring of politically sensitive topics is not unique to China. He has found that in Singapore three kinds of Web pages, political parties’ Web page, Web pages focusing on Singapore’s politics and religions and e-paper Web pages, are required to register with the country’s Web watchdog and to maintain a stable editing team.

Xie claims that effective Internet administration could beef up freedom of communication rather than harm it. He believes freedom of communication is a relative concept and the prerequisite should be not harming other people’s interests and obeying social norms.

“Like rules governing road traffic, you need traffic rules to govern the information highways,” Xie said.