StickWithANose

I was not alone in condemning Google in 2006 for agreeing to censor search results in order to gain access to that long-time fetish of corporate America: the Chinese market. For a supposedly new kind of corporation bandying about the slogan “don’t be evil“, the agreement to censor search results cut to the core of the corporate ‘brand’, but it also created a huge potential for profit-taking.

So, today’s news that Google will be bringing this practice to an end is a real shocker… but the real dirt relates to why Google has changed course…

Google has decided to stop censoring search results in China, after discovering that someone had attempted to hack into the e-mail accounts of human rights activists. The company disclosed the move in a startling announcement posted to its blog late Tuesday.

Google said it was prepared to pull its business out of China, if issues around the surveillance and its decision to stop censoring results could not be resolved with the Chinese government.

I don’t know if this is Google playing hard-ball with the Chinese government, but this demonstrates that senior management feels extremely confident and does not fear a shareholder revolt. Whatever it may be, this is simply beautiful.

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

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. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Now if we could just get our elected officials to play a little hard-ball with our mercantilist “trading partner”….