Google Afterword and Strategic Ambiguity
Since many folks have pointed to my early report and workarounds, for completeness I should report that Google is back to “normal” reachability status in Beijing as of a few days ago. And by normal, I mean the normal GFW keyword and URL filtering is still in place.
The other big news was that Sergey Brin was in Washington DC to lobby on the network neutrality issue and spoke about their China strategy.
The statement from Brin has quickly become a public relations Rorschach test:
“It’s perfectly reasonable to do something different, to say, ‘Look, we’re going to stand by the principle against censorship and we won’t actually operate there.’ That’s an alternate path. It’s not where we chose to go right now, but I can sort of see how people came to different conclusions about doing the right thing.†(from Financial Times)
“We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference.” (from Guardian Unlimited)
I say Rorschach test because the variety of headlines on this were fascinating, ranging from Google sticks by its policy, to Google may make a U-turn in policy. A sample of these:
Google’s Brin regrets China decision
PC Pro, UK - Jun 8, 2006Google to stay put in China
Times of India, India - Jun 10, 2006Google in China: reversal on the way
Guardian Unlimited, UK - Jun 7, 2006We may pull plug on our censored Chinese website, says Google
Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom - Jun 7, 2006
So we have some seemingly conflicting headlines on Brin’s position, which reflects a lot of the different views among Google’s public policy folks, the founders, CEO Eric Schmidt and Kai-Fu Lee. Google’s position right now seems to be “we can perhaps partake in some evil without actually being evil.”
It’s a subtle position, and is bound to make purists quite unhappy. But to their credit, it’s a whole lot better than what Yahoo, Skype and Microsoft have been doing to publicly address their own China strategy. (Which is to say, almost nothing) The public holds Google to a higher standard because Google holds itself to a higher standard.
My conversations with Google folks in the US and China, as well as Internet veterans seems to indicate there is a game of strategic ambiguity going on. Google will comply with the letter of the law as it needs to, while delivering what it considers as the “right product” offshore.
Perhaps they can provide a wedge of sorts – conform to PRC norms with google.cn within China, showing they are respecting local convention; but at the same time, have www.google.com/intl/zh-CN/, hosted in the US, that does not filter or restrict results.
Brin mentioned that only 1 percent of China’s Google users use google.cn, while 99 percent of folks use the US-hosted site. (I’m dubious of these numbers and no story in the news has a direct quote of Brin on this. Anyone have any pointers?)
Regardless, Brin seems be signalling that google.cn is their Potemkin village. But in an inverted variation of the famous tale, the google.cn Potemkin village shows a facade of how restricted searches are in China, when in reality, Chinese users are performing unfettered searches off google.com. And maybe that’s the best solution for now.
