The property in this case would be the access to information in China. According to the three D’s discussed in class regarding properties it is questionable whether one should see this as a property.
Definition: One can define the property as the access of information from Google in China, or in other words the right to what information provided by Google should be allowed in China.
Defendable: It is defendable, in this case via Chinese Law and technical support, though to what extent it is defendable is hard to see in the same way as music on internet is defendable.
Divestible: Similar examples to the Google vs China case how access to information is sold are newspapers and books.
What make this case interesting are the question of defense, the idea of perfect competition as well as the question if freedom of speech should be allowed.
As for defense the ever developing technique allows for both new measures for protection and for intrusion into the protected area, especially on the internet and in the case for information, the softwares for passwords and to break them expands still. For instance the use of images with letters and numbers to printed down during the creation of an account can be seen as a extra protection to access as one tries to protect sites from internet-robots. On the other hand computer-viruses are reaching new levels of intelligence as they are learning new ways to penetrate the protection given by anti-virus software via mails, links et.c. Thus the defense is questionable. Though as one can see people who share copyrighted properties illegally (for instance movies and music) being prosecuted for intrusion to copyright it is possible to see this as a signal of legal defense to information. The technique used here in these copyright cases has been to trace the sharers via IP-addresses which would be able to use in defense of information.
If access to information is limited the probability of perfect competition is limited to a lower extent, this implies that as limits are drawn harsher and harsher where and what information should be accessed the social optimal competition amongst companies is lowered and it is possible that the level of invention due to this is lowered too. As China still is in transition both politically and economically one can ask why they are setting limits to information to their own people as it is in their own interest to increase both competition and invention in their own country.
To my last point whether perfect freedom of speech should be allowed I have no doubt that most people would argue that they should be able to say whatever their opinion is. Though the case of perfect of speech is in my opinion not truly socially optimal. One example where it should not be allowed would is for the protection of the state, one should not for instance be able to talk about military secrets such as programs and facilities or protection plans for politicians from any country. Another example would be the freedom to speak of somebody’s medical records, to protect an individuals integrity is of high importance as I see it and to speak freely in this case is not a socially optimal case.
In the dispute between Google and China the questions are what information that would be censored or not and for what price would the Chinese government allow Google to provide uncensored information.