Google Says West Should Press China On Censorship

Google is asking governments to put more pressure on China to stop censoring the Internet. Google's top attorney, David Drummond, described the practice as an unfair barrier to free trade and said Western governments should defend the flow of information the same way they do products.

The West has complained to the World Trade Organization that China sells its goods below cost and undermines competitors. He said government talks are "the only way that it's going to change, that this tide of censorship or this rising censorship is going to be arrested." "Censorship, in addition to being a human-rights problem, is a trade barrier," Drummond said. "If you look at what China does — the censorship, of course, is for political purposes, but it is also used as a way of keeping multinational companies disadvantaged in the market." "It should be obvious that the Internet sector is very important to the West and so we should be working on seeing that that kind of trade is protected," he said. Drummond did not say if he wanted the U.S. to make a case with the WTO, which could give the U.S. trading rights to compensate for harm to American companies. Instead, he said new trade rules may be needed to cover the Internet.