Google at Davos - Conflicting Reports

Google’s Sergey Brin was at the Davos conference last week, and one of the big questions he faced was Google’s launch of Google.cn, and the decision to run a “censored” version for the mainland audience.

So I was puzzled when on back to back days, two very different takes came out of his appearance. CNN/Fortune provided a detailed interview where Sergey Brin gave more insight into the factors for starting Google.cn with censored results:

Google founder defends China portal

January 25, 2006: 4:51 PM EST

David Kirkpatrick reports: I got a chance today to talk briefly to Google founder Sergey Brin, sitting on a sofa in Davos’ Congress Centre, about a topic all over the papers today — Google (Research)’s decision to put up a site in China that accepts censorship. Brin says the decision was difficult, but made easier by discussions he had with Chinese human rights activists, including one he met at the Fortune Brainstorm Conference.

Brin: Essentially the great firewall is sophisticated enough that it would block connections based on sensitive queries. The end result was that we weren’t available to about 50 percent of the users. Universities can’t afford the international bandwidth, so for example students at Tsinghua University — and I saw this myself — had to pay in order to use Google, and I mean pay a lot, even 25 cents a megabyte, which would be unaffordable even by American standards.

This is nothing…there’s no malicious plan there, it just legitimately is a bottleneck that bandwidth is somewhat limited.

Fortune: It’s probably by policy also.

Brin: I don’t know. I don’t want to speculate. But anyhow the net effect is that all of our services…soon we will be largely unavailable. We ultimately made a difficult decision, but we felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese Web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it.

I met the guy at Brainstorm, I think his name’s Xiao. Just over the years I’ve been interested in this question, and talked to three or four different people in China. My point of view really did change. And don’t forget that I was born in the Soviet Union and my early childhood was spent there, so I’m very sensitive to this kind of issue. It wasn’t easy. But I gradually grew comfortable, and I think we’re doing the right thing.

Seems pretty clear Brin’s thinking process on this. But interestingly, the Guardian’s view was that Brin considered it a “net negative” for the company, and a strong headline heralded this:

China censorship damaged us, Google founders admit

Jane Martinson in Davos
Saturday January 27, 2007

Google’s decision to censor its search engine in China was bad for the company, its founders admitted yesterday.

Google, launched in 1998 by two Stanford University dropouts, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, was accused of selling out and reneging on its “Don’t be evil” motto when it launched in China in 2005. The company modified the version of its search engine in China to exclude controversial topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre or the Falun Gong movement, provoking a backlash in its core western markets.

Asked whether he regretted the decision, Mr Brin admitted yesterday: “On a business level, that decision to censor… was a net negative.”

The company has only once expressed any regret and never in as strong terms as yesterday. Mr Brin said the company had suffered because of the damage to its reputation in the US and Europe. [Emphasis/bolding by me]

The ellipses “…” raise some questions about the context, and what was “yada yada‘ed” out of the quote. Brin said on a “business level” it was a “net negative.” He could simply be commenting on the cold financial analysis of the decision. Was it also pertaining to the greater reputation and prestige of Google? The Guardian seemed to think so, and interpreted it as “damage” and “regret.” They seem to be reading a lot into it. Perhaps too much.

It’s possible Brin is still 100% behind the decision, and accepts the financial “net negative” as the price. But I’m wary of how the Guardian painted the picture. The Guardian/Observer has a joint irrepressible.info project with Amnesty International, so they have been very quick to jump on the aggressive human rights critique to make a point. At the time, I was wary about the newspaper partnering with an advocacy group. This is exactly what I was worried about — putting activism into the mix starts to raise doubt about a paper’s ability to faithfully report the news.

As for Brin’s decision, it is interesting that talking to some “human rights” people helped him shape his current thinking. But I would suggest he should talk to more than just “three or four” folks about this.

Sergey, you can reach me at my Google Mail address. You know what it is.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 1:23 am and is filed under China, Technology, GFW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.