Maybe Google Should Have Consulted the Pope

...before prostrating before Ming the Mirthless:

Google's strategy in China, from early 2000 onwards, was to build a Chinese language version of its search engine that would mirror the content on the English language google.com. But on September 3, 2002, the Chinese government, deploying the so-called Great Firewall of China, shut down the Chinese language version of google.com because domestic Chinese Internet users had been using the uncensored search engine to access forbidden websites.

The company was faced with a joint ethical and business dilemma. It could either negotiate a compromise with the Chinese government or effectively cede the Chinese market to local search engine Baidu. Brin, Page, and company CEO Eric Schmidt chose to do business with the authorities in Beijing and build a "customized solution" for the China market.

In December 2005, Google signed a deal with the Chinese government that enabled the company to establish a legal presence in China. On January 27 of this year, the newly-engineered search engine "google.cn" launched. In contrast with the original Google Chinese language site in China (which continued to hobble along, ever vulnerable to the capricious whims of the Great Firewall), google.cn is censored. The Google engineers added an algorithm which replicated the ideological desires of the authorities in Beijing. As Clive Johnson explained in a recent New York Times magazine piece about Google in China:


Brin's team had one more challenge to confront: how to determine which sites to block? The Chinese government wouldn't give them a list. So Google's engineers hit on a high-tech solution. They set up a computer inside China and programmed it to try to access Web sites outside the country, one after another. If a site was blocked by the firewall, it meant the government regarded it as illicit--so it became part of Google's blacklist.

Google chose to mimic the Great Firewall. Everything that the Chinese government blocks, Google also blocks. Sensitive links, to Falun Gong, Tibetan opposition, or Tiananmen Square commemoration sites, no longer appear--instead, google.cn informs its users that the requested information is not available due to Chinese law. The presence of this information is, therefore, defined by its absence, by its holes rather than its wholeness. It's a scheme which might have been imagined by Kafka or Orwell.

And so a company founded on the free flow of information helps a Communist government tighten the fetters on its enslaved citizens still further.

This puts paid to the notion advanced by one commenter that what Google did for the Chicoms was business-as-usual, doesn't it?