Google Sees Rules Violations in Limits on Internet Access

Google Sees Rules Violations in Limits on Internet Access

With China evidently in its sights, Google has released a policy paper contending that countries that limit Internet users’ access to information providers outside their borders violate their World Trade Organization commitments.

The company did not single out China in the position paper. But Google has had a running battle with Beijing over censorship, and many of the examples cited in the paper came from the company’s experiences with China.

The paper was published online Monday but went largely unnoticed until bloggers started writing about it Tuesday.

Bob Boorstin, Google’s public policy director, made the free-trade link forcefully in a posting on Google’s public policy blog, although he stopped short of mentioning China specifically.

“The premise is simple,” he wrote in a statement posted on the blog with a link to the paper. “In addition to infringing human rights, governments that block the free flow of information on the Internet are also blocking trade and economic growth.”

Mr. Boorstin went on to call for Western officials to challenge trade barriers to information. “In the paper we’re releasing today, we urge policy makers in the United States, European Union and elsewhere to take steps to break down barriers to free trade and Internet commerce,” Mr. Boorstin wrote.

James Seymour, a specialist in Chinese politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said that invoking W.T.O. rules “suggests that Google is fed up, and willing to play hardball.”

The Google policy paper said that more than 40 governments around the world now to some extent restrict freedom of information on the Internet — which it said was more than a tenfold increase in the last decade of governments with such restrictions.

Besides China, others include India, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Vietnam.

Google’s country list came from the OpenNet Initiative, a joint project of Harvard University, the University of Toronto and the SecDev Group, a Canadian Consulting company.

In an interview Tuesday, Mr. Boorstin said he hoped the paper might resonate with trade officials currently negotiating the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership — a Pacific rim free-trade pact that is being pushed by the United States. The partnership was a topic last weekend in Yokohama, Japan, at a meeting of the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group, of which China and the United States are members.

The White House, Mr. Boorstin said, has referred to the Trans-Pacific Partnership as "the first full-fledged trade pact of the 21st century, and we want to make sure that it reflects the 21st century economy."

Until January, as an accommodation to Beijing’s policy, Google was censoring search results delivered to computers in China. But in March, reconsidering that approach, the company curtailed its operations in China and began directing Internet users there to its site in Hong Kong. A former British colony, Hong Kong maintains freedom of speech and other individual liberties despite its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.

Since March, Google has lobbied Beijing with little success for unfettered access to the Chinese market.

Even before it pulled out of the mainland, Google was losing market share to a Chinese rival, Baidu. And it has lost further market share since then. The latest industry estimates suggest that Google, which before March had about one-third of the mainland market for Internet searches, now has only about one-fifth, with Baidu having the rest.

Kaiser Kuo, the director of international communications for Baidu, said it was wrong to suggest that China’s controls on the Internet were unfairly helping his company.

“Google no longer incurs the costs of censorship that we continue to incur; those costs include not only hardware, software and manpower but most importantly the time of our very senior managers,” Mr. Kuo said. “We should not labor under the illusion that censorship is some sort of competitive advantage to Baidu.”

Google’s public policy paper emphasized that when the W.T.O. was created in 1995, international free trade rules were broadened in many ways to cover services like Internet search. But Chinese officials have consistently said that their commercial policies comply fully with all W.T.O. rules.

Google joins a growing chorus of critics of China on trade grounds. The Obama administration opened a broad investigation last month of whether China had violated W.T.O. rules by reportedly subsidizing exports of solar panels, wind turbines and other clean energy products.

Nefeterius Akeli McPherson, a spokeswoman for the Office of the United States Trade Representative in Washington, on Tuesday declined to address the details of Google’s complaint. But in a released statement, she said, “Google’s paper underscores the fact that the growth and competitiveness of the U.S. information industry, a major factor in our long-term prosperity, depends on access to foreign markets.”

Keith Bradsher reported from Hong Kong and Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco. Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting from Beijing.