Back in 2007, when one of the perennial Greek/Turk spats flared up again online, some hothead had a terrific idea: why not create a home video claiming that modern Turkey's founder, Kemal Ataturk, was gay—and that everyone else in Turkey is gay, too? The result was uploaded to YouTube. Similar videos followed. One might have hoped that such grade-school taunting would seem so ridiculous that it would simply be ignored. But here's how Google described what happened next:

"An individual public prosecutor in Ankara was able to block YouTube access for all Turkish users for over two years after YouTube rejected his demand that they remove a number of videos from the site globally because they were deemed to be breaching a Turkish law that protects the reputation of its founder Kemal Ataturk. An offer to restrict viewing for objectionable videos within Turkey was deemed inadequate by the Prosecutor—only the worldwide application of the Turkish law would have seen the ban reversed. Recently, the videos at the heart of the ban were automatically removed as the result of the copyright claim. These were reinstated (though restricted based on IP address for Turkey) when the claim was not upheld. As a result, YouTube is newly accessible from Turkey but the power to ban again in the same way remains until the law is clarified."

The block was removed two weeks ago, but Google's warning already looks prescient. A few days later, YouTube was blocked again over a political sex scandal video.

Internet censorship as trade barrier

Yes, it's censorship—but is it also a "trade barrier" under World Trade Organization rules? Google thinks so, and it wants government, especially the US and the Europeans, to act.

Google today put out a lengthy white paper (PDF) called “Enabling trade in the era of information technologies: breaking down barriers to the free flow of information,” which argues that such Internet disruptions are “tantamount to a customs official stopping all goods for a particular company at the border.”

Such blockages in the tubes aren't happening only in a few isolated outposts, either; Google claims that "more than 40 governments now engage in broad-scale restriction of online information."

Trade organizations have for some time been pushing the idea that Internet censorship is a trade barrier. This argument has two belated results. First, it gets tech companies off the hook for complying with government-mandated censorship. Remember the terrific drubbing that companies like Google and Yahoo took from Congress and others over their complicity with Chinese requests for e-mails and other information? Making the issue about trade barriers removes much of the responsibility from individual companies, who are just following national laws.

Second, this has the effect of shifting enforcement to governments, which Yahoo and Google have explicitly supported for years. In their view, companies are simply not equipped to pick and choose which national laws they will obey as they operate around the world. But having countries like the US hector China on Internet censorship issues in moral terms has not worked well and has generally led to Chinese charges of American hypocrisy. But now that China is a member of the WTO, making Internet censorship the trade dispute that can be judged by WTO rules gives other countries the necessary leverage to bring about change in Chinese policies.

“There is a growing consensus that governments must do more than appeal for the protection of human rights and encourage development of tools that allow users to bypass government firewalls,” says Google in its new paper. “Censorship on the Internet poses a significant economic threat to companies seeking a level playing field as the established markets overseas.”

Such disputes aren't merely political, or related to dissidents. In many cases, especially in the huge Chinese market, business interests appear to lie behind much of the blocking. Google points out repeatedly how China's Great Firewall has been used to limit the appeal of its services, even as local ripoffs flourished and featured many of the same “problems” that the Chinese government had with Google. The country also puts strict limits on foreign ownership.

And Chinese actions can be pretty non-subtle. For instance, in 2007, China was piqued at the US and altered its firewall so that "users who typed in Web addresses for the three major US-based Internet search engines (run by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!) were taken not to their site of choice but rather to the Chinese-owned search engine, Baidu."

The report is transparently self-serving, but that doesn't mean the issues raised aren't legitimate (and Google did belatedly take some action of its own earlier this year when it stopped preemptively censoring its Chinese site's search results). The US government has already intervened with the WTO over similar access issues in the analog world, most famously in a recent case against China's strict limits on the importation of Western films and media (which the US won).

Earlier this year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signaled that she would go along with the tech companies' desire to make this a government-to-government issue. "New technologies do not take sides," she said in January. "But the United States does." She pledged that the US government would take a worldwide stand for a "single Internet" and would oppose the efforts of China, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia to impose censorship, detain bloggers, and block Internet businesses.

The European Parliament has already indicated some willingness to go along with the "trade barrier" concept, and EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes endorsed it on a recent trip to China.

Of course, playing by the WTO's rules cuts both ways. The US outlaws its own set of Internet businesses, including online gambling, and it was the subject of a WTO complaint from the island nation of Antigua and Barbuda, where many of these offshore gambling servers are located. Despite losing at the WTO for years on this issue, the US simply refuses to comply.