POLITICS JANUARY 13, 2010
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Google’s reasons for leaving China aren’t as pure as they seem.
Google is being widely hailed for its announcement yesterday that it will stop censoring its search results in China, even if it means having to abandon that vast market. After years of compromising its own ideals on the free flow of information, the company is at last, it seems, putting its principles ahead of its business interests.
But Google’s motivations are not as pure as they may seem. While there's almost certainly an ethical component to the company’s decision—Google and its founders have agonized in a very public way over their complicity in Chinese censorship—yesterday’s decision seems to have been spurred more by hard business calculations than soft moral ones. If Google had not, as it revealed in its announcement, "detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China," there's no reason to believe it would have altered its policy of censoring search results to fit the wishes of the Chinese authorities. It was the attack, not a sudden burst of righteousness, that spurred Google’s action. (Click here to read what Andrew Sullivan calls the "best new blog.")
Google's overriding business goal is to encourage us to devote more of our time and entrust more of our personal information to the Internet, particularly to the online "computing cloud" that is displacing the PC hard drive as the center of personal computing. The more that we use the Net, the more Google learns about us, the more frequently it shows us its ads, and the more money it makes. In order to continue to expand the time people spend online, Google and other Internet companies have to make the Net feel like a safe, well-protected space. If our trust in the Web is undermined in any way, we’ll retreat from the network and seek out different ways to communicate, compute, and otherwise store and process data. The consequences for Google's business would be devastating.
Just as the early operators of passenger trains and airlines had, above all else, to convince the public that their services were safe, so Google has to convince the public that the Net is safe. Over the last few years, the company has assumed the role of the Web’s policeman. It encourages people to install anti-virus software on their PCs and take other measures to protect themselves from online crime. It identifies and isolates sites that spread malware. It plays a lead role in coordinating government and industry efforts to enhance network security and monitor and fight cyber attacks.
In this context, the “highly sophisticated” assault that Google says originated from China—it stopped short of blaming the Chinese government, though it said that the effort appeared to be aimed at discovering information about dissidents—threatens the very heart of the company’s business. Google admitted that certain of its customers’ Gmail accounts were compromised, a breach that, if expanded or repeated, would very quickly make all of us think twice before sharing personal information over the Web.
However important the Chinese market may be to Google, in either the short or the long term, it is less important than maintaining the integrity of the Net as a popular medium for information exchange. Like many other Western companies, Google has shown that it is willing to compromise its ideals in order to reach Chinese consumers. What it’s not willing to compromise is the security of the cloud, on which its entire business rests.
Nicholas Carr is the author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. His next book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, will be published in June. This piece is cross-posted on his blog, Rough Type.
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5 comments
So Nicholas Carr is saying that Google's fundamental business interest in an uncensored flow of information is perfectly aligned with the public interest in a free flow of information. So what! Does that make Google's step less praiseworthy. What Google did that we can all be grateful for is to go public and present the choice to the Chinese government (and to the rest of us) in the starkest terms. Either permit a free Google site or have none at all. All large American business' have tried to muddy the waters or have acceded to Chinese government demands for everything from censorship to surrendering the web addresses of dissidents. Yes Google initially tried to find a middle path which would involve a censored google.cn while keeping google.com free to anyone (including sophisticated Chinese computer users). Everyone who maintains operations in China has to compromise to some degree. Maintaining engagement with China is so vital that a degree of compromise may sometimes be justifiable. That in no way diminishes the importance of what Google has done. What I find objectionable is that Nicholas Carr is holding Google up to a standard of absolute disinterested purity and then finds Google wanting. Perhaps Nicholas Carr should journey to a galaxy far, far away inhabited by philosopher kings -- he will not find people who meet his high standards on the planet earth!
- mclurman_temp
January 14, 2010 at 12:22pm
Exactly how does Google pulling out of China make the Net a safer place? As far as we know, Google and "at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors" were attacked from China-based IP addresses. Why would a Google-free China reduce the number of these attacks? The only argument I could come up with is that maybe removing Gmail from China would reduce the incentive to hack into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. But Google also said in their blog post that "dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. " So now they'll be attacking only U.S- and Europe-based Gmail accounts. Again, how does this make the Net safer? I'm afraid I don't buy your argument.
- deisner
January 14, 2010 at 1:01pm
While describing this as a "sgnificant development" the always interesting, and erstwhile China resident, James Fallows writes:
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/01/first_reactions_on_google_and.php- ndmackenzie
January 14, 2010 at 4:01pm
I don't contend that Google's action is laudable because it makes the internet safer for the rest of us. We'll have to look to our own computer security resources for that. I admire Google's statement and actions because they present the fundamental choices to everyone -- especially people inside of China -- in clear terms: either allow a free flow of information on google's web site or do without. Google will not be party to a censored google.cn any longer. That this public presentation of the issue made the information watchdogs in China uncomfortable seems evident from the fact that it took the authorities about 24 hours to come up with any comment at all. Their eventual response was a frank admission that internet sites had to contribute to "social stability" to do business in China. I'm sure the propaganda officials would much rather continue to operate in the shadows. Google has forced the issue into the open. A big win in my opinion.
- mclurman_temp
January 14, 2010 at 4:33pm
The logical conclusion seems both obvious and Quixotic: decentralize our servers and encrypt our communications.
- Bill Day
January 17, 2010 at 11:40am