US and Europe

I’m a regular reader of  TechCrunch. In fact I visit the site several times a day at work and when I’m away from the office, it is one of the blogs I regularly check in with via Twitter. Today, Mike Arrington (TechCrunch founder) wrote a post that brought to my attention what Google announced today regarding their operations in China.

The post, written by David Drummond tells about how in December 2009, Google detected a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on [Google's] corporate infrastructure originating in China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.” Drummond goes on to say that this was just not a one-time security incident but that “a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.”

Now, keep in mind that in 2006 while launching Google.cn, Google agreed to play along with the Chinese government’s censorship policies. At the time, Google said they did this “in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed [their] discomfort in agreeing to censor some [search] results.” Google went on to say they would monitor the situation on the ground in China and that if they would “not hesitate to reconsider [their] approach to China” if needed.

Then Drummond makes his point and says what Google plans to do.

These attacks and the surveillance they 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. 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.

When I first read all this, my gut reaction was a swell of admiration for Google to take such a courageous stance. I mean, they are #2 behind the current Chinese search king, Baidu. China is a huge market and will get much, much bigger as hundreds of millions of Chinese  go online over the next few years. That Google would be willing to shut down operations in China, cede market share and revenue to a competitor all in the name of human rights and protecting their customers should be a rallying call…but probably not for China.

I don’t know why Google really took this stand. The optimist (like Robert Scoble) in me wants to believe their motives were pure and that this will eventually lead to Chinese consumers standing up and demanding freedom of information on the interwebs. However, Google has a responsibility to their shareholders. They are a public company, after all. This is a very, VERY clever PR move for Google everywhere else in the world and probably also in China (if consumers there ever get the whole truth). There just might be less altruistic business motivations afoot here (read this post from TechCrunch blogger, Sarah Lacy.

My enthusiasm has been curbed and even though I hoped we might have a busy night watching a revolution unfold as everyday Chinese stood up against a tyrannical and evil government, China is not like we think they should be. In fact, as of this posting nothing to do with this incident is a top trending topic on Twitter.

We’ll see what happens but for now–nice try, Google.