It s not every day, week, month or year that one American company essentially threatens to fire an entire country, much less one with its own stock of nuclear weapons. But Google not only suggested that it would have to walk away from its business in the People s Republic of China, it did so in a January 12 blog post condemning a list of Chinese offenses including censorship and attempted break-ins of its computer systems.
"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," Google declared in the post. "We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn," its China-based search site.
That s a far more public rebuke than anything the U.S. government has said in public. Next to that, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton s speech on Internet freedom Thursday reads like a diplomatic attempt to catch up to Google s lead. Google s newfound militancy cannot be what the Mountain View, Calif., Internet firm had in mind when it agreed to do business in China in 2006.
At the time, Google took a lot of criticism for agreeing to censorship by Beijing s Communist rulers of Google.cn. In response, it argued that it could make more of the Web s information available to Chinese users with a locally based search engine, and that disclosing when censorship forced it to withhold relevant results -- it follows a similar practice in the United States after removing a YouTube video in response to claims of copyright infringement-- lent transparency to its operation.
Further, Google said it would keep its Gmail and Blogger services based offshore to protect Chinese users of those sites. But Google might not have realized then that the Chinese government would alter the bargain by demanding stricter censorship or blocking other Google services- or that Chinese hackers would launch a widespread, well-orchestrated series of attacks on its computers and those of other U.S. companies to break into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. There aren t many things foreign companies can do to stop the abuses of another country s government, but suggesting that the other country s money is no good has to be among the most severe responses possible.
What comes next? Who knows? Google says it has not yet removed the filters on Google.cn and continues to talk with Beijing about its next move. But why would that regime relent on such a fundamental instrument o
