The problem with submitting to the whims of authoritarians (Part 1)
On Google's misadventures in China, and how a company breaks its own values
The problem with submitting to the whims of an authoritarian government – ok ok, one of the problems – is that it’s sometimes hard to figure out exactly what those whims are. Authoritarians are notoriously fickle. Their demands can change from moment to moment, and the consequences for crossing them can be severe. Some military operation is totally fine to include in your search results one day, and then the next day, linking to its Wikipedia article will get your tech company kicked out of the country. What a pain!
Google launched google.cn, its China-based search engine, in 2006, and as part of that, agreed to censor search results in line with the Chinese government’s wishes. The immediate problem faced by the “Don’t be evil” company (from an engineering standpoint) was what, exactly, to censor. They could make guesses – human rights abuses? Free Tibet? Tiananmen Square? Falun Gong? – but it’s very hard to get an official list of what to censor, because everything on that list is, well… censored.
As a new fish in the Chinese pond, Google didn’t want to make waves. Said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the time, "I think it’s ignorant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning to operate and tell the country how to operate.”
So, Google did what Google does best: they built an algorithm and collected data. Instead of creating their own list of censorable terms, they analysed the traffic patterns of the local Chinese search engines, who were already in line with China’s censorship laws. They monitored what they were letting through, and used that to build their own database.
It was a very Google-y clever solution, not only solving the censorship problem, but it also helping to address another little problem the that the Google engineers were facing - i.e. the crushing moral weight of being complicit in disinformation, oppression, human rights abuses, etc. If they just used the algorithm, Google engineers would never need to make an active decision about what to censor. They wouldn’t even have to see a list of what was being censored.
It wasn’t them doing the censoring, it was the algorithm! So clean!
Google’s adventures in China were awkward, short-lived, and, as described in Steven Levy’s In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, the whole time was characterized by similar types of moral queasiness about everything they were doing, combined with gymnastic feats of ethical contortion to convince themselves they were doing the right thing.
When the company was first considering a China move, they asked Google policy director Andrew McLaughlin to complete a study, specially focused on ethical implications. His conclusion was to stay away: “My basic argument involved the day-to-day moral degradation,” said McLaughlin, “just dealing with bad people who are badly motivated and force you into a position of cooperation. It’s degrading to the company. Life is short, focus on other markets.”
Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were reportedly “depressed by the idea that if we just stayed out of China, we would be giving up on a billion plus people,” according to McLaughlin, and so they, along with Schmidt, decided to throw out the report and do their own analysis. Engineers to the core, they built “a form of moral metrics,” balancing the evils of censorship and complicity against potential benefits of entering the Chinese markets.
Shockingly, they reached a totally different conclusion than their policy director. In fact, their analysis showed that the outcome that gave Google access to a lucrative new market was actually the right thing to do. Google wanted to give the world access to information, and maybe they could do the same in China. Maybe they could model ‘American-ness,’ and show the Chinese another way they had never dreamed of. Maybe, by censoring content, they could actually help fight censorship: the Googlers counted it as a major victory that, when you googled a censored term on google.cn, the results would come back censored, but also there would be a note on the page telling you that there were results removed… which was made better?
A New York Times article at the time described the google.cn experience:
[T]he first page of results for “Falun Gong,” they discovered, consisted solely of anti-Falun Gong sites…. A [Google Images] query for Tiananmen Square omitted many iconic photos from the protest and the crackdown. Instead it produced tourism pictures of the square lighted up at night and happy Chinese couples posing before it.
Even as Google cooked their search engine to match the demands of the Chinese government, China seemed unimpressed by Google.
China already had its own popular default search engine, the homegrown Baidu, and Google often came across as blundering, late-coming foreigners. Googlers bristled at local customs of exchange, which they saw as bribery, and local hires struggled to fit into Google’s quirky Silicon Valley work culture. Meanwhile, the Googlers back in California didn’t trust their new Chinese colleagues, and regularly blocked their access to essential parts of Google’s code base. Even the word “Google” sounds like “dog-dog” in Mandarin, which didn’t help.
Knowing the Chinese government was voracious for data on its citizens, Google kept as much data as possible offshore. It’s unclear just how effective this was, but it did make it nearly impossible to run bandwidth-heavy services like YouTube, and it also resulted in frequent server outages, which gained google.cn a reputation for unreliability.
Google was forever tied up in red tape. As a foreign-owned company, they couldn’t access geographical data to build the local Google Maps, they couldn’t serve news results, and they couldn’t offer social features like chat and comments, all of which were common on the homegrown alternatives. It seemed like there were always new permitting and licensing requirements, causing frequent delays in business, which the Chinese government would dangle over Google as its demands grew and grew.
Google generally complied with censorship requests on google.cn (they now employed a third-party Chinese company to handle censorship requests, so they still had a way to avoid the dirty work), but soon China wanted control over all Chinese-language results on the worldwide version of google.com, which made the Googlers especially queasy. Google had hoped that they could slowly ease censorship the longer they were in the country, but instead, it seemed to be getting worse.
Then, in late 2009, Google discovered that it had been hacked.
Someone had infiltrated Google’s US servers. They’d stolen proprietary Google data and had accessed several private Gmail accounts, all belonging to well-known Chinese dissidents. It was a sophisticated operation, one that suggested state-sponsored hackers. It looked very much like a direct attack by the Chinese government.
Following some tense meetings over the Christmas holidays, Google decided to go nuclear. They opened 2010 with a public blog post, A new approach to China: “These attacks and the surveillance [we] have uncovered – combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web – have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.” As of that moment, they announced, Google search results in China would appear uncensored, and damn the consequences.
And the consequences came, as expected: by March, Google Search was banned from the Chinese internet. Some Google services limped on, but by 2014, the company was kicked out entirely from China.1
It’s hard to say why, exactly, Google handled the hack this way.
Was this the sum of years of moral woundings of the compromises they were forced to make? Or was the wound a bit closer to home? After all, Google kept puttering along in China, until their own servers were attacked directly. (Google’s blog post makes prominent mention of “the theft of intellectual property from Google” - emphasis added.)
Or are we simply looking at a rational business decision? Maybe Google just saw a failed attempt at penetrating a crowded market, one that was too much work and caused too much international bad press for the company.
We’ll never know – I’m not certain even Page and Bryn could provide a totally unclouded answer to this question. However, we may be able to glean more insight by examining how another American tech megacorporation, Facebook, handled their own China move, and exploring how Big Tech is now confronting the growing authoritarianism around the world. In fact, as it turns out, we’re not even done with Google in China.
Read Part 2, in which Mark Zuckerberg handles the moral weight of doing business with authoritarians, and a super secret Google project is uncovered.
google.cn still exists as a domain, and as long as you’re outside of China, you can still visit it, but it’s blocked within mainland China. As far as I can tell, the website is currently just a placeholder that immediately redirects you to Google Hong Kong.