Google.cn Still Remains In China

hackingbear writes "Google appears to be content to remain in China doing business as usual while it finds a way to work within the system, according to one of the search giant's founders. This despite a strong statement 30 days ago that it would stop censoring search results in China and possibly pull its business out of that country. And the company is still unwilling to confirm or deny if the alleged attacks were carried out by the Chinese government. 'I don't actually think the question of whether [the attacks were performed by] the Chinese government is that important,' Brin said. (That's the difference between state-sponsor vs. individual hacking. Why is that not important?) In the mean time, shortly after we celebrated google.cn lifting censorship, the exact same censorship has been quietly re-enabled as proved by this Chinese search query on June 4, despite the lack of any concrete actions by the Chinese government, which has so far made only useless general and standard statements on the matter."

Comments

That didn't take long.

[Anonymous Coward]

And here we thought Google had a strong backbone to stand up to china. Apparently not.

Re:That didn't take long.

[sopssa]

Who really thought that?

Of course they aren't going to pull out. People here are like the 18 year old girls who seriously trust that their boyfriend is going to pull out just before instead of cumming in.

Re:That didn't take long.

[Virak]

That's because the summary is terrible, and so is the person who wrote it, and also the Slashdot editors, for posting it.

Google appears to be content to remain in China doing business as usual while it finds a way to work within the system, according to one of the search giant's founders. This despite a strong statement 30 days ago that it would stop censoring search results in China and possibly pull its business out of that country.

The usage of "despite" here would suggest there's some sort of contradiction betweeen these sentences, however Google's original post said:

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Which is to say, the lack of obvious action thus far isn't particularly notable. When it's been half a year and there's been no further news, then you can start bitching, but not now.

In the mean time, shortly after we celebrated google.cn lifting censorship, the exact same censorship has been quietly re-enabled

And this part is just outright false. They were never disabled in the first place, as noted even by several comments in the article that was linked to there. Furthermore, Google's announcement never said anything like that they'd be immediately removing the censorship.

Basically, there's nothing of note here and anyone whining about how Google hasn't pulled out and uncensored their search engine and organized an elite team to overthrow the oppressive Chinese government and given everyone on Earth their own personal unicorn has gotten vastly inflated expectations due to poor reading comprehension.

Too expensive to not be evil

[hobbes75]

Obviously not being evil is too expensive... maybe that explains the amount of evil in the world in general.

Re:Too expensive to not be evil

[HangingChad]

Obviously not being evil is too expensive.

It could also be, "Leave and we'll kill your family." Or economic threats, or they could have threatened anyone who ever worked in the China offices with arrest and prosecution, they have a lot of ugly tools at their disposal. Probably not, but when you're dealing with a government you don't always know the whole story.

I'm just saying it's a little early to condemn Google before we get more facts.

Re:Too expensive to not be evil

[Brian Gordon]

good chance they would detain and otherwise mistreat Google employees if Google were to start openly claiming

Foreign executives being arrested for political reasons? Sounds like they should be clamoring over each other on the roof to get a spot on the last chopper out of Beijing. Not a slow scaling-back of operations.

Right.

[TheSpoom]

Top businesspeople in company overrule moral arguments from staff in order to ensure future profits.

News at eleven.

Bad Move

[UndyingShadow]

The quickest thing Google can do to lose the confidence of its users is be Two-Faced. With all the recent privacy concerns, if Google starts acting one way after saying "Don't be Evil," it's going to make everyone question if Google can be trusted. Can they?

Mixed results

[Arancaytar]

It's true that the tank man does not rank number one on "tiananmen" as it does on google.com - but if I type tiananmen into the search box, the top suggestions are

tiananmen square protest
tiananmen square 1989
tiananmen square tank
tiananmen tank
tiananmen square tank man
tiananmen tank man

And if I make the search more specific by adding "tank", I do get a few copies of the infamously censored image on page 1, even on Google.cn.

Of course, I haven't digged this deeply before, so I don't know if the censorship was always this half-assed.

Re: Google.cn Still Remains in China

[HoldmyCauls]

Well, yeah...

Where else would you put it?

Re:Google Reality Check

[swillden]

Google, as a publicly traded company, has only one obligation: to make a profit for shareholders.

That's not necessarily true. A publicly-traded corporations primary obligation isn't to make a profit, it's to fulfill the goals laid out in the articles of incorporation and the prospectus that defined the public offering. In most cases, those documents say that the primary goal of the corporation is to make a profit, and that, then, is what the company's directors must focus on doing. But there are plenty of corporations, especially non-profits and for-profits that have a "social good" agenda, with different goals, and the directors of those corporations would be failing in their duty to their shareholders if they focused on profit at the expense of their stated goals.

Was "Don't be evil" part of Google's corporate charter? And if so, was it given an equal or higher priority than profitability? I don't know, but if so, then Google's directors have a legal obligation to abide by it.