Mark Gilbert’s Blog

With a company mantra of “Do No Evil” it would seem extreemly ironic that Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin would sell out to the oppressive Chinese government.

For those of you who havn’t read about this, Google on Tuesday said that they would comply with the Chinese governments repressive request to censor it’s search results in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The PRC, another irony calling yourself the “people’s republic” for a country run through a dictatorship, would like Google search results to be doctored to meet with the governments approval. While Google has offered a Chinese translated version of its search engine for many years, it’s users have been frustrated by government blocks on the site. Google will set up a new site, Google.cn which it will censor to satisfy the Chinese government.

The first question which should be asked is why? Why would Google go against it’s own doctrine and do something such as this? Well the answer more than likely is that old chestnut, money.
Money and lots of it too.

At first glance this would appear to be incorrect, Google is expected to turn in $4.03 billion in sales for 2005 and to produce $6.55 billion in sales this coming year. Standing in stark comparison, Baidu.com, the current search engine market leader in China produced $38 million in sales in 2004 and $72 million in 2005.
However with the Chinese econommy set to literally explode in the same way the Taiwanese economy has done since the 40’s. Taiwan has the 17th largest economy in the world and has been one of the fastest growing economies for the last 50 years. With China set to do the same Google decided that China was a market they wanted to be a part of.

Another irony lies in the fact that just last week Google sid they would resist a U.S. Department of Justice subpoena to obtain it’s search query data on behalf of the US government. On the light of the Chinese choice, Google’s decision to withold the data was more about not wanting to be bullied by the US government than it was a privacy issue on behalf of it’s users.

Google decided that it would be more damaging to pull out of China all together than it would be to comply and censor itself. Is this true though, is partial information better than non at all? Well that depends wholely on whether Google wants to stick to it’s principals, and further a free and unrestricted flow of information for all the world’s people, or whether it wants to position itself to cash in on the next big Asian “Tiger Economy”.

“The real question is whether Google could have done better - using its market power to support free speech and influence the Chinese government to allow the broadest range of speech to reach the Chinese people,” said Kurt Opsahl, an attorney at Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Perhaps some results are better than no results, but at the same time, it places a single gatekeeper between the people and the information, which is easier to regulate and control.”

I personally am not sure whether limited and controled information is really better than no information at all.

I do think they could have done better. The Chinese government is only communist when it suits them. If for any given descision at any particular time, capitalism is a better choice they go with capitalism. If they are honest they would like to be a bigger power in the world economy and are probably jealous of Taiwan, Google can help them achieve that goal, in the same way that Google wants to partner with China, I would wager that China also want’s to partner with Google.

Google is one of the largets companies in the world, their stock value puts them far ahead of Microsoft and other such tech giants, I just feel they could have done more or tried harder instead of caving in so easily. But I guess I’m not sat in the boardroom of Google like Page and Brin having to choose between my principals and billions of Dollars.

Cheers