Google Defies Korean Censorship Law 2009-04-09 18:58
Last July, I reported how YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, submitted to pressures from the the South Korean government in defiance of Google's own policies. It prevented Korean users from viewing a video clip which irritated the head of the National Police Agency -- the mastermind behind the brutal suppression of last summer's relay demonstrations. This post is an update to that situation.
Since before Lee Myung-Bak's ascent to power, but particularly since then, the Korean government has been pretty active in instructing major web portals to delete any content which the ruling group found objectionable. Material that raised suspicions about the integrity of prominent members of the ruling group, such as the video clip noted above, was targeted particularly ruthlessly. Tech-savvy users turned to foreign websites such as Google Groups and YouTube in an effort to resist censorship; still, those foreign websites turned out not to be the safe havens that they seemed before. After all, all three of the world's largest web portals -- Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live -- have local offices in Korea. They cannot simply ignore pressures from the Korean government. In this country as anywhere else, it's tough to do business if you disregard the people who have the power.
I'll talk more about Google later in this post. But let's get a little more background information first.
So Many Ways to Censor the 'Net
Besides the active removal of politically offending material, internet censorship in Korea takes a few other forms -- some of which are more subtle than others, but all of which can be readily abused for political purposes. Some of the stuff below will repeat what I said in other posts, but I also have some updated information.
First of all, internet service providers are required to block access to any website that the government deems inappropriate for public viewing. Most of the time, it is porn and gambling that gets blocked this way. However, several dozen North Korea-related websites are also permanently blocked at the request of some government agencies. Because this blocking is performed by blacklisting an IP range, thousands of innocuous websites also get blocked in the process. Some estimates put the number of blocked websites to be as high as 120,000.
Also growing is the threat of several ridiculously (and intentionally!) flexible clauses in newly enacted regulations. For instance, it is now possible for the Minister of Culture and Tourism to order any website to be blocked if three or more instances of copyright infringement are detected there. It does not matter if the website in question neglected to remove infringing content. So if Minister Yu In-Chon (whose work actually has nothing to do with the internet, but who seems to be one of President Lee's favorite crony) wanted, for example, to block a Daum Agora, he could just get some of his own men to post infringing material on it, and use that as an excuse to block it!
Here's more, South Korea is one of the very few countries in the developed world that imposes criminal penalties for "propagating falsehood" on an internet forum. Choi Yong-Geun, a reporter who accused the police of killing a protester in June 2008, was promptly arrested for this reason and remains in prison until now. Park Dae-Sung, whom the government believes is the phenomenal economist Minerva, was also imprisoned for "propagating falsehoold". Most of the time, the charge is based on what the relevant government officials think is true or false, which, as we all know, is usuaslly biased towards whoever has more power. As a result, those accused of this crime invariably face a long struggle to prove themselves right.
But having incontrovertible evidenve in your favor doesn't protect you against jail time. Did I mentioned that South Korea is also one of the very few countries in the developed world where you can be put in jail for libel, even if you can prove that you did not produce a single falsehood? That's right; there's a maximum of three-year jail time for defaming a person by saying something true. (The penalty is higher if what you said is false.) Basically, what this means is that anybody can have you arrested and detained for revealing some truth about them which they find inconvenient. In addition, recently proposed amendments will allow libel prosecutions to proceed even without consulting the defamed party -- a total lack of respect for the principle of due process! Did you hear that? Yeah, that was the sound of public accountability going down the drain.
You Ain't Got No Anonymity
Finally, there's this unique regulation about real identity. If you want to post so much as a comment on a website that gets more than 100,000 visitors a day, you must verify your real identity. The verification is performed through a complicated network of public and private registries, and it is meant to give the owner of the website -- and anyone else who has access to its servers, such as law enforcement officials -- nearly perfectly reliable information about where to find the author of any given content. Usually, you need to provide two pieces of verifiable information, such as (1) your government ID and a telephone number registered in your name, or (2) a copy of your passport and your banking information. Unless you hand over these details, you are not permitted to post anything on large websites. What if you live outside of Korea and have neither phone numbers nor bank accounts in Korea? Well, too bad; you're forbidden. After all, why would the Korean government want foreign residents to post things on the internet, since they can't be prosecuted at will?
These laws produce a tremendous amount of chilling effect. First, they impose heavy penalties such as the ones noted above. Then they make sure that you can be prosecuted, by taking away your anonymity. The combination of these regulations make the average web surfer highly reluctant to write anything overly critical of the powers that be. And this often has real-world effects, too. Many of the laws discussed here were first put in place in the months immediately preceding the last presidential election. During the election campaign, anyone who posted information about Lee Myung-Bak's actual and alleged criminal records (he has more than a dozen of those) was threatened with heavy penalties. Although such threats may not have changed the outcome of the election, they did help Lee hide one of his biggest weaknesses -- utter disregard for the principle of due process.
It's a Crime to Jam your Keyboard
And of course, there are outright insane cases where government officials will try to prosecute somebody -- or just cause a lot of annoyance -- even when there's no law to support the charge.
On March 16, 2009, policemen walked into a few homes and offices and seized computers belonging to three relatively prominent members of the discussion portal Daum Agora. Why? According to the police, these individuals had artificially inflated the page-view counts of their own posts, in order to make themselves look more popular and thus gain more attention. How? By jamming the F5 key with a 10-won (~$0.01) coin, forcing the web browser to endlessly refresh the page. This trick, according to the police, produced over 100,000 false page-views.
No, this isn't some April fool's day joke. It really happened. And it is, in my opinion, by far the most ridiculous act of "law enforcement" ever conducted by Lee's government.
First of all, there's no law against refreshing your web browser many times over, unless you do it with the intention to cause an unusually heavy load on the servers. It is a mystery how the police ever obtained a warrant in this case -- since Daum Corp. hadn't filed any complaints against the said users. (For your information, 100,000 page-views would constitute less than 1% of Daum Agora's usual traffic.) Furthermore, page-view counts have little to do with the likelihood that your post will be noticed. Agora Best, which ranks posts by popularity, relies more on votes than page-views (although page-view counts are displayed as well). There used to be a function that allowed you to sort a particular day's posts by page-view count, but this function was removed quite some time ago. I for one would love to know how I can articifually improve my Agora Best rank, but it just doesn't work that way!
And yet, this utterly un-criminal case was widely publicized in the news -- and particularly in pro-government media such as Chosun Ilbo -- as a paradigm case of the unreliability of left-leaning internet forums. (Yes, they love to bash Daum Agora at every opportunity.) The seized computers were returned after a few days, and no charges were laid. A carefully planned media stunt, yes, but nothing more than that.
Okay, Back to Google
Okay, I have yet to tell you how Google defied all this censorship, which I suggested in the title of this post that it did. Well, sorry to disappoint you; it didn't. Rather, Google decided to avoid it altogether.
YouTube is getting pretty popular in Korea these days. Now it has more than 100,000 users. According to the law, YouTube (and Google too, since they share their user accounts) must now require its users to undergo identity verification. On March 30, YouTube Korea announced that such a policy will be coming shortly. The announcement made headlines here and there, as it would be the world's first instance of a Google company imposing a blanket requirement for identity verification. People who are sensitive to issues of censorship and anonymity, such as I, were extremely disappointed. It seemed that YouTube/Google was doing the same thing that it did back in July -- once again bending to Lee Myung-Bak's unjust policies.
And then, Google headquarters reversed YouTube Korea's decision. Yesterday in its official blog, YouTube Korea retracted its previous announcement. Instead of requiring South Korean users to submit sensitive personal information prior to posting videos and comments, beginning April 8, 2009, YouTube would not allow South Korean users to post anything at all. Only those who select another country in their account settings will be permitted to post videos and comments, which for most users is a rather annoying procedure given Google's un-Korean interface. So basically, Google would rather give up a large chunk of the Korean market than deprive its users of their anonymity!
Another entry in Google's official Korean blog further clarifies Google's position on this matter. According to Rachel Whetstone, Google's Vice President of Global Communications and Public Affairs, "Freedom of expression is a priority in everything that Google does. We believe that more available information means better choice and freedom, which ultimately empowers the individual." Further along the entry, Ms. Whetstone states rather explicitly: "In extreme cases when the laws and absence of democratic procedures in a country diverge too much from our principles, we face a situation where we can no longer provide benefits to our users without breaking laws." So this is the path that Google seems to have decided to take with regard to YouTube Korea. Pulling out.
Of course, there are a few caveats. First, Google already collects a titanic amount of personal information in the form of access logs, search logs, etc. which can be used to identify users, both in Korea and elsewhere. Second, it is not clear how Google's position this time fits together with what it does in other oppressive countries, such as China. Google might have a case for continuing to operate in China as it does, but that case isn't exactly clear for many people. Third, there's always the problem that Google Korea and YouTube Korea, the local offices that feel the most political pressure, might disregard instructions from Mountain View, California. After all, the video clip mentioned at the beginning of this post was blocked despite instructions to the contrary! Fourth, the new YouTube policy implicitly encourages South Korean users to pretend to be foreigners, which might rub against other existing and future laws. Given the "flexibility" with which Lee's government interprets all sorts of obscure statutes, I wouldn't be surprised if some minister or another argued that YouTube Korea is breaking the law again. And of course, Google has a distinct advantage compared to other web portals in Korea such as Daum and Naver, when it comes to ceasing certain operations. Google's market share is still rather small in Korea, so it does not have much to lose. It might have decided that the loss is smaller than the headache, negative publicity, and administrative cost of implementing and maintaining a special membership procedure different from Google's global standard.
Nonetheless, kudos to Google for being the first web portal to stand up against Lee Myung-Bak's ill-advised attempts to control his online critics. It is a fresh breeze for all of us. Let's hope that others can follow suit! It can't be impossible, given the global scope and fluid nature of the 'net! As John Gilmore once observed, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
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