Google Renews "Don't Be Evil" Motto With New China Policy

Google made waves yesterday afternoon when it announced a new stance on censoring its search results in China. While for the last few years, its policy has been to work with the Chinese government to block certain results, a new slate of cyberattacks on Chinese human rights activists targeting their Google accounts has prompted the company to publicly rethink its approach.

The backstory is that in order to enter the much coveted Chinese market, Google accepted certain censors on its results consistent with the Chinese government's approach to controlling the flow of information. At the time they said, "While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information... is more inconsistent with our mission." The argument then was basically that some information was better than no information. And while some agreed, I think that many people felt it was the first time Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto really came under the strain of the pressure and enticement of dramatically expanded market access for doing just a little evil.

When they made the announcement yesterday that "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," the Twittersphere irrupted in cheers. The charitable view of this was that a young company that generally tries to do the right thing and be a beacon of the right way to be big rather than the wrong had finally reconciled a big ugly piece of its portfolio. Well, some people just didn't like China and liked that Google was sticking a finger in their eye, but I don't think those people are worth much attention.

Others had a more skeptical view. Sarah Lacey wrote a good post about the announcement that, while not cynical, did point out a few behind the scenes things worth noting, like what it must have meant about the state of negotiations for Google to make so public an announcement. Others, like perpetual social media cynic Evgeny Morozov called an even deeper level of BS, saying "to wrap their decision in the melodramatic rhetoric of cyberattacks on Chinese human rights activists? Give me a break." His piece is worth a read, although important to put in the context of his general stance that all the excitement around social media and the democratizing power of the internet is just a bit of fluff.

So what do I think?

1. Google is going through the growing pains of being a big company. This is part of the "charitable view" of the situation I guess, but I do think it's pretty clear that the bigger a company gets and the more power and weight they have to throw around, the easier it is to see business opportunities that don't, strictly speaking, meed the ethical standards they had set before. They're making bets on how to throw their weight around - China is one place, but so is becoming a phone manufacturer (although admittedly that's not quite as morally questionable - it just has the potential to piss off their Android partners) - and some of them are going to blow up in their faces.

2. There is likely some sincerity here. I would imagine that there has always been tension within Google about what their approach to China should be, and it may be that the voices of dissent around the censoring policy finally pushed their arguments over the top.

3. Of course this is PR, but Lacey is probably right when she says that there was nowhere else to go with negotiations. This is great PR for Google; it's going to be all over the news and most people won't read and dissect the announcement like we're doing here. But companies don't leave 30% market shares in the most desirable new markets for PR. Whether it's just cyberattacks I don't know, but this is a serious move.

4. The implications of this are *way* bigger than Google. Forget Google for a second; they're basically making a thinly veiled, massively-public accusation that the Chinese government is hacking into accounts. While China is clearly command-and-control when it comes to the flow of information, they still have to tow a public line about what they actually do and this may bust out of that. It elicited a reaction from the US State Department asking China to explain itself. What's more, the financial destinies of the US and China are so complicatedly connected that this is likely also a precursor to more of these challenges to come.

(Photo: Kage Tora)