The question of how Google was going to break into China’s search engine marketing audience has been open since the company began operations there in 2006. Today, that question has possibly been answered – it won’t.
Today, a post on the official Google blog announces ‘a new approach to China’.
When the company launched Google.cn in 2006, it made a controversial concession to the Chinese government to censor search results based on words like ‘democracy’ or ‘human rights’. In today’s post, Google spokesperson David Drummond said that this was “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”.
However, after detecting a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China” in mid-December, Google seems to have decided that enough is enough. As a result of their investigation into the incident, Google has uncovered a series of cyber-attacks on businesses operating in China. Beyond this however, the company has also discovered that many of the intrusions are of a disturbingly political nature.
Drummond says that the company has “evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists”. They have also found that dozens of “US, China and Europe-based” Gmail users who advocate human rights for the Chinese have been “routinely accessed by third parties”. This appears to be independent of the attack on the Google infrastructure, as the company believes the breaches to be the result of phishing scams or malware.
Today Drummond announced that: “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 oeprations in China”
In a brave move, Google has announced that it is ”no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn”. Whilst willing to enter talks with the Chinese government on how it could continue to operate within the country, the company is realistic; “we recognise that this may well mean having to shut down google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”
Whilst the censorship arrangement with the Chinese government was often criticised, it made sense for a company built on search engine marketing and internet advertising revenue. China is the largest internet market in the world, and despite its company motto of ‘don’t be evil’, it is still a commercial business.
These attacks have altered this relationship, and prompted the company to make a suprisingly public announcement about its decision to review its Chinese operations. Many commentators, such as BBC News’s Shanghai correspondent Chris Hogg, believe that making a public statement about the review before consulting Chinese officials will have “outraged the Chinese”. Hogg says this is the “highest profile rebuke by a major US firm of how China operates”.
However, Google says that it has taken this approach because “this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech”. The question remains whether other foreign companies will follow their lead – or agree to even more concessions to capitalise on the gap in the market.
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