Founder: Google.cn Was “Bad For The Company”

Posted by philo on Jan 29, 2007 in Economic | 0 comments

I’ll say again, “Well, duh.”

Google’s decision to censor its search engine in China was bad for the company, its founders admitted yesterday.

Google, launched in 1998 by two Stanford University dropouts, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, was accused of selling out and reneging on its “Don’t be evil” motto when it launched in China in 2005. The company modified the version of its search engine in China to exclude controversial topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre or the Falun Gong movement, provoking a backlash in its core western markets.

Asked whether he regretted the decision, Mr Brin admitted yesterday: “On a business level, that decision to censor… was a net negative.”

The company has only once expressed any regret and never in as strong terms as yesterday. Mr Brin said the company had suffered because of the damage to its reputation in the US and Europe. [Emphasis added]

Last June Brin announced that Google had “compromised its principles” in abandoning their “Don’t be evil” motto to partner with the Chinese government. Admitting that your critics had you pegged from Day One is well and good, particularly when the criticism levied against Google by Students for a Free Tibet, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Open Net Initiative. But if agreeing with your critics doesn’t lead you to change your behavior, then you have not yet reclaimed your principles nor made the right decision.

From what was said yesterday a policy change seemed unlikely in the near future. Co-founder Larry Page said: “We always consider what to do. But I don’t think we as a company should be making decisions based on too much perception.”

The launch of Google.cn was a “net negative.” It “compromised [Google's] priniciples.” It precipitated a massive outcry from Google users, technophiles, and free speech advocates. And yet Google has not tried to correct its mistakes. It has not announced that it will discontinue providing a censored platform on Google.cn, despite the fact that according to Sergey Brin “virtually all the company’s customers in China use the non-censored service.” Not only is Google.cn morally reprehensible, it isn’t used.

Back in June Brin acknowledged that Google was considering reversing themselves and abandoning Google.cn. They haven’t. Seven months later – a year after the site’s launch – Google continues to provide its tailor-made censorship and disinformation engine for the Chinese market. After Brin’s statements were released I wrote:

Google repeatedly resort to paternalistic, intellectually dishonest, and outright shameful arguments in defense of its decision. The company went so far as to equate censoring information on human rights and democracy in Tibet and China as morally on par with censoring Nazi hate speech or child pornography in Western democracies. Congressman Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, undressed this defense:

I cannot begin to describe how disgusted I am by this particular argument. Because, in essence, it equates the vile language and evil purposes of Neo-Nazi groups and hate speech with content provided by the human rights activists of Falun Gong, by journalists and by democracy activists in China. There simply is no comparison between efforts of the democratically-elected government of the Federal Republic of Germany to move against hate-mongerers, and the Chinese regime cracking down on religious freedom, human rights and democracy.

But today, finally, we see Google recognize the failing of their partnership with the Chinese Communist Party. Google users have shown that they’d rather have the Chinese government censoring them than an American corporation doing it at the government’s request. My guess is Google has proven themselves much better censors that the CCP’s 30,000 internet police.

This remains true today, except the recognition of their failures has not lead to a change in course. Google.cn, a black smear on the reputation of Google, carries on, blighting a company that continues to resist making the decision that it knows is right.

Technorati Tags: censorship, China, Google, Tibet