Credit where credit is due (more Google tea leaves to read)

Posted on by Luis Villa

One of the very first things that made me skeptical about Google was their approach to censorship in China, which I thought deeply compromised their supposed ‘don’t be evil’ approach to the world. It struck me that their position- summarized as “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” bespoke a fair amount of arrogance about the value of Google and a discounting of the value of uncensored information. I didn’t mention that issue in my recent post about Google and reading their tea leaves, but it certainly is one of the big tea leaves to be read.

And so they’ve added another layer to the tea leaves with this announcement that Google will be backing out of censorship in China and possibly abandoning China altogether. Go read it.

It is hard to imagine any other American company having the cojones to make a public statement like it, and I have to applaud them for it. Google is different; anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t understand them very well. The question we must continually ask is ‘how different, and for how long will they remain different?’ Schmidt’s quotes the other day suggest they are becoming more like others, and that is troubling, and worth writing about and reflecting on (not least by people within Google.) But to even post this is a reminder that they are still very different from most of their peer large corporations. I suppose for those of us who continue to read the tea leaves the followthrough after this post will say a lot as well.

Published by Luis Villa

17 thoughts on “Credit where credit is due (more Google tea leaves to read)”

  1. The optimist in me hopes that they actually are different and actually care about human rights. The pessimist in me thinks they are only considering this because google isn’t really popular in China (Baidu is).

  3. btmorex: sure, but 25% market share in China (which is what they are at right now) is still eventually as big as the US. Most American companies (read: most American MBAs) would piss their pants at the idea of giving up on a potential market that big, even if they are currently getting their asses kicked there.

  4. Reminds me of my growing up in the Communist Czechoslovakia … we called this reading of tea leaves the art of kremlinology. I wonder what it means about Google.

  5. Google is a state-level power. As I just said to someone on identica, the Google CEO has more power than any single person on the planet who isn’t the head of a G8+BRIC country (and frankly more than some of the G8 powers.) So kremlinology isn’t that far off. (Though I think that implies they have some malign intent; which I don’t think is the case- hubris is going to be their problem, not evil.)

  6. I think Google made the best decision now deciding enough is enough but I also think they made best decision a couple of years ago when they decided to stay and try and do business on Chinas terms. After all, Who are we to say that Google should not provide service to a country that doesn’t follow the same ideologies as yours. I think its evil to look down our noses on a country and the way they run their country. Chinas policies have a lot of room for improvement and communism is an outdated system. We know that, but its ultimately their business how they do things, and very western of us to judge.
    I know censorship is wrong, but wouldn’t denying any information be worse than censorship. The internet has a wealth of information that doesn’t get censored.

    Any way I’m glad they’re out. It seems China have been getting a little out of control lately, there’s a line they’ve crossed it now. Google were the bigger entity here, they tried, they followed China’s rules and laws but it just didn’t work out.

  7. Reading tea leaves is always hard. It does read a bit like “We are unable to protect our infrastructure world-wide, and were being used to launch attacks against and gather data from lots of our customers. This isn’t a business risk we can take much longer, because our customers will become sceptical about entrusting us with any more data. So we need some way out quickly.” Or am I too cynical and this really is about censorship?

  8. I agree with btmorex: the “real Coogle” in China is not Google itself, but Baidu. Just have a look at its services: http://ir.baidu.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=188488&p=irol-products

    Furthermore, the “Google censorship in China” issue is overhyped IMHO. The chinese regulations are related to the “.cn” domain and the possibility to make business in the internal chinese market (where Baidu is definitely stronger than Google). When Chinese people want to see the uncensored Google, they just need to type e.g. “www.google.co.uk” instead of “www.google.cn”.

    This “Google is different and cares about human rights” campaign just seems to me a publicity stunt, covering the loss of interest in investing in the Chinese market.

  9. I’m amused at the contradictory nature of the skepticism here.
    1) ‘Chinese people will find it easy to use Google anyway.’
    2) ‘By withdrawiing from China, China will stop hacking Google, reducing China’s security risk.’

    Either it is hard to use google.com from China (and therefore dissidents will stop using it, and China will stop hacking their accounts) or it is easy to use google.com from China (and therefore it will still be a target for the chinese government, whether or not google.cn is available.)

    More generally, this whole notion that ‘google is losing therefore they are getting out’ is crazy. No American business has dominant market share in China, and they are all killing themselves to please that market anyway, because it is so huge and the long-term growth prospects so large.

  10. Luis, please don’t mix the contents of different comments and label them as “contraddictory skepticism”. If you take two different comments from different people, focusing on different aspects and coming to different conclusions, they are just “different opinions” and should be addressed separately.

    In my previous comment I wrote two simple (and non-contradictory) things:

    1. the Google censorship in China has always been limited to the national “.cn” portal, but Chinese people have always been free to use other national portals (and thus experience, for example, the censorship of Google US search results due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – see for example http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-865936.html );

    2. you claim that Google is wasting huge business opportunities in China. I beg to disagree, unless solid numbers are provided. And please consider that Google is/was maintaining expensive research and development centers and huge investments in China, and it’s probably the only country in the world where a huge competitor (Baidu) owns the vast majority of the same users and market: are you sure that the remaining market share is worth the investment and costs? Are you sure that Google shareholders would remain silent about the loss of a huge market and the related profits?

    I never wrote that “by withdrawiing from China, China will stop hacking Google, reducing China’s security risk” – and in fact I can’t see how withdrawing from China whould reduce the number of hacking attempts against the mailboxes of human rights activists (and that’s one of the reasons that make me skeptic about the real reasons of the Google decision).

    Oh, btw: you seem to be sure that the Chinese government is involved in the hacking attempts. But since they could easily monitor human right activists and their computers in their own houses, I don’t see why the government should mess with an American company, and take the risk of being caught…

  11. So, we assume the government did it, because there is extensive evidence that they’ve done it before: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13731776/Tracking-GhostNet-Investigating-a-Cyber-Espionage-Network

    There is no ‘risk of being caught messing with an American company’; they mess with American companies all the time. Security-sensitive companies have long known about the risk of espionage (industrial and otherwise) in China and acted appropriately (many security-sensitive companies require you to re-image your laptop before and after going to China, for example, and forbid you from logging into email while you’re there.)

    Google’s shareholders don’t matter; their company structure ensures that Larry, Sergei, and Schmidt are the only opinion that matters: http://news.cnet.com/Google-to-defend-dual-class-stock-structure/2100-1030_3-6060691.html and that was explicitly done so that they could advance their corporate values over the interests of the broader class of stockholders.

    They *do* have a huge business in China. They’re certainly not a defacto monopoly like they are here, but even the pessimists say they have 25% market share there, and some more recent numbers suggest they are back up to 35%, which (once the whole country gets on line) means the same number of people as in the entire US. No American company that I’m aware of has thrown away even fractions of that kind of market share in China out of principle.

    Sorry to argue bit-by-bit here, but I’ve got to actually ‘get some work done’ today ;)

  12. […] 7 days to go to linux.conf.au 2010! 3 days agoLuis Villa Luis Villa's Internet Home » Blog Posts Credit where credit is due (more Google tea leaves to read) todayLWN.net BerliOS compromised todayMagda Pecsenye Ask Moxie How to help todayMagni Onsøien […]

  13. […] Luis Villa: Credit where credit is due (more Google tea leaves to read) Planet Mozilla – Mar, 12/01/2010 – 18:06 One of the very first things that made me skeptical about Google was their approach to censorship in China, which I thought deeply compromised their supposed ‘don’t be evil’ approach to the world. It struck me that their position- summarized as “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” bespoke a fair amount of arrogance about the value of Google and a discounting of the value of uncensored information. I didn’t mention that issue in my recent post about Google and reading their tea leaves, but it certainly is one of the big tea leaves to be read. […]

  14. last time google create too many enemies- apple and its concuration with nexux, now china…i dont support google- they are trying to know too much about us

Comments are closed.