Clever PR move, Google: give up the ball
The Chinese expat net-o-sphere is abuzz this week with Google’s challenge to the Chinese government. I’ve seen commentary ranging from mindless protestor-like exaltations of a company “sticking it to The Man” to the more patronizing and pragmatic “why would Google want to give up all the money they can make?”
First, as someone living in China, I’d like to explain some things. Google operates in China as a separate entity from Google’s main headquarters in the USA. I’ve frequently seen this misunderstood by people who post on sites like slashdot, whenever there is a story about Google censoring information. In the past, Google has agreed to censor information on google.cn (from Tiananmen Square, to Falun Gong, to the Dalai Lama, and so on).
However, these same searches are not censored on google.com, and google.com is not blocked by the Great Firewall. The Great Firewall, though, does detect your search queries, and will itself block access to information coming off of google.com (and others) if it finds material it has flagged as objectionable. (Of course, it should be said that anyone who gives a shit about free access to information in China uses a proxy, VPN, or some other secure means of avoiding the Great Firewall entirely.)
So, in a nutshell, Google has kowtowed to the Chinese government’s whims on its internal operations, but it has forced the government to be the proactive party if it wants to attempt to censor information outside of that. It’s an important distinction.
So, the past few years, while many activists in the west have decried Google (and others) for censoring information at all, I would submit that it hasn’t been as bad as it could possibly be, because Google apparently was only censoring information on google.cn, which I personally don’t think many people use anyway.
So, back to this week’s mess, you’ll have to excuse me, but I read (past tense) Google’s “principled” blog post and dismissed the high-mindedness as bullshit. My first reaction to this was that google.cn must not be making much money, and therefore it’s worth the risk to Google…in effect that they are weighing the negative of losing revenue from google.cn inside China in order to gain favorable press everywhere else in the world.
In fact, I may be wrong about google.cn not being a significant source of revenue, as articles online estimate the business at $400 million to $600 million, and of course it’s a business with high potential upside, since the Chinese Internet market basically only has one way to go: up.
OK, so Google’s statement isn’t automatically bullshit from a monetary standpoint. Then again, Google is now enjoying a certifiable avalanche of free, and positive, press in media all over the world. Is that worth more than $600 million? Perhaps. Google must really believe that the government has something to do with the attacks on its servers, and that may well be the case. Still, I believe this move is a calculation on Google’s part that they have something to gain.
Of course, you can take a middle road approach that this is all a lot of hot air, that what Google is up to is establishing a negotiating position before talks with the government. One wonders, though, if this could be the case; even though “face” isn’t as strong a concept outside China as within, would Google’s public image in the West be able to withstand the loss of face if they now agree to self-censor once again, and remain in China?
Personally, I think the current situation in China is untenable for the long term. I’m talking not about Google, specifically, but the whole Great Firewall in general. If China wants to continue to make money, and join the rich nations in trade, they are going to need to offer unfettered access to their markets. It means that eventually the childishness of blocking anything they disagree with will have to end, in order for the country to really be taken seriously in business in general, and the Internet business in particular.
The question, of course, is how long is “eventually”? I submit that China is perhaps 5 to 10 years away from being forced to open the floodgates to the outside world. If I’m right, then this stand might not be as much of a risk for Google as one might think. Perhaps they’d be expelled from China, but eventually they’ll be able to return, because the Chinese government can’t continue ruling solely from the perspective of fear forever; sooner or later greed trumps paranoia, and things have to open up more.
And it’s that word “expelled” that really makes this a crafty move from Google’s standpoint. If Google sticks to its guns, then the Chinese government will have to either adjust the law, or else expel them forcibly. If they do the latter, then the government absorbs the PR hit (something the Chinese government takes very seriously), and Google comes out looking like an angel to the rest of the world (unlike Yahoo! and Microsoft). If the Chinese government caves in to Google, then they lose face inside the country, and suddenly all the other foreign companies here would be demanding the same treatment, and this would impact the entire Internet industry here.
My prediction is that the government will expel Google if they don’t make concessions, but in this instance, I have to admire Google for putting the ball back into their court. Sometimes you affect the game more profoundly when you don’t control the ball.