Google versus China

This is quite the dramatic turn of events. As a result of recent attacks aimed at Chinese human rights activists, Google has announced that they’re ceasing censorship of Google China, which could force the Chinese government to shut it down. These paragraphs in particular from the Google Blog post got my attention (via chartier):

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered—combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web—have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.

You have to wonder what Google’s motivations for setting up shop in China were. I doubt they were particularly interested in the money - they’re already so immensely profitable and superior to the competition that they can cast away their Chinese operations without worry that a competitor will use the Chinese market to threaten Google.

As for the moral reasons - contrary to what many believe, the Internet doesn’t immediately deliver hugs & rainbows to countries that receive access to it. Certainly Google can’t. The benefits that access to Google brings to Internet users are mainly related to efficiency, not openness. Google makes searching for topics more accurate. Google makes Internet-related tools that increase Web performance. Google makes a simpler and more pleasant Web experience.

Google doesn’t provide access to ideas prohibited elsewhere. Google doesn’t give dissenters a greater voice through promotion - not if those people plan to live in what passes for freedom over there, anyway. Google did perhaps provide more secure communications - but the recent attacks demonstrated that Google can’t even provide that.

Even though the attacks failed, Google must realize that they can’t keep this up forever. Even if they can manage to fend off the attacks by the human-rights opponents, eventually the Chinese will try to force Google to hand over the keys to the accounts.

Could Google keep fighting? It would be a hell of a challenge. They would have to keep the attacks at bay, which would be a never-ending duel between the resources of one of the world’s largest Internet companies, and the resources of one of the world’s most populous nations. It would be a battle of talent, wills, and brains worthy of Hollywood movies, if such a story was filmable.

The thing is, once the government decides that Google can’t be broken through digital attacks, they can simply shut the site down. This would have drawbacks - many if not most Chinese will notice that Google disappeared, at least some Chinese would realize why Google disappeared. It could strengthen their cause when one of the largest Internet presences in China is pulled because of anti-government sentiment in the country. Despite whatever evil capitalist action that China will claim Google pulled to justify their actions, its absence will be noticed throughout the country.

China could, of course, decide simply to steal Google China. That would generate a lot of external pressure - what investor would want to invest in a country that would take away their investment if a human-rights activist somehow got himself/herself involved, after all? - but few citizens in the country would notice that anything had happened at all.

Of course, Google might be able to simply host all of Google China’s content out-of-country to prevent its theft (indeed, they might already do that, I haven’t bothered finding out), where Chinese authorities can’t mess with it. China could conceivably go create a Google clone to replace it, but doing more than replicating the initial look of the site would be difficult, though not impossible.

None of those solutions get China its dissident information, but it does remove any opposition to its efforts. Conceivably China could merely threaten to do these things to Google in an effort to get its dissident informaton, but as of today Google’s interest in Google.cn has evaporated and therefore that tactic would probably fail.

I wouldn’t be surprised if China, at that point, started quietly threatening Google China’s employees - forcing Google to trade the welfare of its employees for the welfare of the dissidents would be a hard choice for Google to make, no matter what their level of interest in Google China is. On the other hand, that kind of bullying isn’t going to make them look very friendly around the rest of the world. It all depends on how forcefully the Chinese government wants to clamp down on dissent.

So, Google’s (and Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s as well) choices right now are to:

1. Shut down Google China.
2. Cooperate with Chinese authorities and provide them with the dissident ID’s.
3. Run Google China with bad, easily-breached security, providing them with the ID’s without it really being their fault that activists are being rounded up from their email records.
4. Run Google China and fight off the attacks, and fail, ruining the lives of the activists by incompetence instead of greed and apathy.
5. Run Google China and fight off the attacks, and succeed, providing a small boost to the human-rights movement provided Google can keep China from shutting them down and/or threatening them.

For Google, a company that believes heavily in liberal ideas, their only options that wouldn’t ruin their collective conscience would be 1 and 5. Unfortunately, Google must assume that they can’t pull off Option 5 (which, given the many huge stumbling blocks in the way to achieving that one, seems likely), so they resort to the only sure solution. Fortunately, Google’s swimming in enough cash that they can make this decision on a purely ethical basis.

What about smaller foreign search engines operating in China? Neither Yahoo or Microsoft are headed off the deep end, but they aren’t swimming in piles of dollar bills either. They might sell out the activists to pay the bills, which would save American jobs by ending (or at least locking up) Chinese lives. It’s not a decision I would want to be stuck with making.

Google claims to have went into China to try and open their Internet and make lives better in the country. Whether that goal was admirable or naive is up for interpretation. What it has led to is not: Google now has the evidence to put away or eliminate human rights activists in China, and the most sensible decision is to run out of the country with it. If they’re smart, they’ll destroy the data before the Chinese manage to hack the rest of Google looking for it. That’s a sad turn of events, and it proves that Google entered territory it had no business being in when it started Google China.

That said, you have to admire Google for its courage. It routinely picks fights where victory is barely within the realm of possibility. After all, look at Android. Then again, at least Android never led to anyone being imprisoned or killed.