State Run Search Engines—Should We Be Worried?
From Flickr user visionshare
Internet users who want to search for something online are most likely to go to Google or another popular search engine in their home country. While that search engine company may comply with pre-existing government censorship guidelines for filtering results, it's likely that results will still have some variety. But what if authorities had another option for controlling the information that web-searching citizens had access to—a search engine created and run by the government itself?
In light of the growing dominance of private tech enterprises like Google and Facebook, some states are growing increasingly wary of having their citizens use search engines owned by these foreign companies. So the governments of China, Iran, and Turkey, which already fiercely censor material on the web, are attempting to launch search engines that are created, managed, and run by the state.
WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF “NATIONALIZING” INTERNET SEARCHES?
Some see the development of national search engines as another extension of government regimes that aim to filter and censor what citizens can access on the web.
As Luke Allnutt of the Tangled Web blog on Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty points out,
“National search engines are potentially worrisome as they could be one of the first steps toward closed societies creating national intranets. If you're lucky enough to even get on the internet, it would be a sanitized world, where only pictures of the great leader and sycophantic state media would be piped into your home by state-run broadband.”
Anti-censorship and privacy advocates are concerned by these developments because a user's abilities to perform web searches will be in the hands of the government. Search results will be limited to what the government wants you to see.
Here are a few countries that have announced plans to build national search engines.
CHINA
In June 2010, the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, launched a search engine known as “People’s Search” in Chinese and “GoSo” in English. Not surprisingly, content is heavily filtered. A few months later, state-run China Mobile Communications and Xinhua News Agency announced that they were also interested in building a national search engine. The two groups have agreed to launch a joint search venture.
Both hope to compete with the two most widely used, and private, search engines in China: Baidu and Google. But will Chinese netizens even use these alternative search engines? It seems unlikely, given Baidu's popularity (it boasts 63 percent of the market share) and the government's recent move granting Google another year to operate its Chinese search site.
IRAN
In late August 2010, Hadi Malek-Parast, Director General for Research and Development at the Iranian Information Technology Company, announced that Iran has started developing a national search engine called “Ya Haq,” a Persian expression meaning “Oh Lord.” The Iranian government hopes to launch the search engine by 2012. Malek-Parast tried to downplay the implications of building a national search engine, saying "International search engines Google and Yahoo are used to meet domestic and global needs of users, but the national search engine is merely aimed at offering services to Iranian users inside the country.”
This national search engine would presumably filter results so internet users would be given access to state institutions and preapproved websites. The party line is that providing a national search engine will produce a list of more locally relevant search results than users would find using Google or Yahoo and that it would be quicker and cheaper. At the same time, it will also make it even easier for the government to monitor the online activities of its citizens and to censor material.
It remains unclear if Iran actually will be able to build and maintain a search engine. Luke Allnutt argues that the likelihood of Iran launching “Oh Lord” seems somewhat unlikely. He points out that they may not having the capacity to build one or the money to fund it.
RUSSIA
The Russian Ministry of Communication, in partnership with private companies that remained unnamed, is developing a national search engine known as “Kremlyandex.” The reasoning behind the venture is similar to the reasoning being used in Iran and China: to have a search engine that is owned by the state rather than a foreign company. Evgeny Morovoz notes that according to Russian newspaper RBK’s anonymous sources inside the Kremlin, the search engine would aim to satisfy "state-oriented" needs such as "facilitating access to safe information" and "filtering websites that feature banned content."
There are already a number of popular search engines in Russia, including Yandex.ru, which holds over 60 percent of the market share, Google, Mail.ru, and Rambler. This has led many Russian netizens to question the state’s motives. Gregory Asmolov, a contributor to Global Voices, writes:
“Most [experts and bloggers have] asked why RuNet needed a governmental search engine. It’s obvious that such an engine might be an instrument of censorship while promoting pro-government content and reducing the visibility of oppositional websites. However, experts argued that the main challenge is not to develop a search engine but to make it popular in a situation when Russian users already can choose among Yandex, Google, and Rambler.”
The government intends to require all government offices, universities, and schools to use the national search engine.
In a blog post last March, Morovoz shared excerpts from an interview that influential Russian technology expert Igor Ashmanov gave to a Russian radio station regarding the government's desire to build a national search engine. Ashmanov stated,
“A national search engine [may be subsidized so that it] does not need sell any ads in its first few years, which is quite attractive. It has to focus on getting a market share, not making money....It can be installed in all state institutions, on all computers that are assembled in Russia, in all schools, prisons, military institutions, hospitals, and so on. This can guarantee it a certain level of traffic; 10 to 15 percent is what they can get. Then one can talk about the owners of Internet resources that are close or loyal to the government—and we know that there are oligarchs that are socially responsible and close to the state—and to install this search engine on their own resources. So finally this may lead to a national search engine. This won't help to topple Yandex, but it would help overtake Google, Rambler, and everyone else.”
The popularity of existing search engines is not seen as an obstacle for the Russian government. In fact, it is one of the primary factors motivating them to build a national search engine. As Morozov observes, "The Kremlin wants to build this new engine for reasons that have nothing to do with national pride or the need to preserve national heritage. All the Kremlin wants to do is to establish firmer control over the information flows in the country and given that they have quite a few unfair advantages—both market-based and legal—they may as well succeed."
TURKEY
A national search engine has also been in the works in Turkey. Similar to the cases above, the motivating factor to develop this technology was a concern that all of the major search engines are based in foreign countries.
Tayfun Acarer, chairman of Turkey's Information Technologies and Communication Board (BTK), has argued:
"All internet communication data goes to foreign countries and then it returns. This activity has a security aspect. I believe that our search engine will be popular in Turkic countries and Muslim countries and I am confident that these countries will trust our search engine.”
The risk factor behind Turkish internet users accessing foreign-based search engines is just one issue influencing the state. A desire to further control and filter what netizens have access to on the web seems to be a larger motivating factor.
WILL CITIZENS FLOCK TO THESE NEW SEARCH ENGINES?
Moves by states to set up their own search engines, while worrisome, should be viewed in the context of online environments where tech-savvy netizens are already (and will still be able to) getting around firewalls and censorship by using proxies and circumvention software. But what about ordinary citizens without the technological know-how to access other search engines? Is the central threat posed by this rash of national search engines not that no one will have free access to whichever information they want but that the internet will be further divided, with those who know how to circumvent firewalls separated by a growing barrier from those who are not as savvy?
Further, as Evgeny Morozov notes today, this is a trend that is at least to some degree indicative of a larger worry:
"In 2009 it became obvious—for American diplomats anyway—that Washington was in a unique position to exploit the fact that so many of Silicon Valley companies were uncontested leaders in so many markets and that so much civic and political activism was emerging in those digital spaces. In 2010 American diplomats squandered such opportunities by unnecessarily politicizing this space, alerting their very opponents of the political uses to which the internet can be put."
