Remembering Google

Idealism

In April 2004, Google debuted on the stock market. It is impossible to read the Open letter from Google’s founders to its future shareholders without liking Larry Page and Sergei Brin:

Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served–as shareholders and in all other ways–by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short-term gains.

Google is the new king of the hill. It’s cool, it’s geeky, it’s Google. The great hope against Microsoft. Power to technology. They’ve got balls and they’ve got brains. Their PageRank algorithm is mythical, you can’t buy it with money; if you try to influence it, you will be punished; and the only input it accepts are the collective actions of the Internet community… or not?

Reality

Welcome to China, an extremely appealing market where you have to pay a price for competing: censorship. The Chinese government requires search engines to monitor searches and eliminate “harmful” content. Searches such as “Dalai Lama“, “Tiananmen Massacre“, “Falun Gong” and “Taiwan independence” are monitored and filtered by the Communist party.

If you accept those conditions, you can establish servers on Chinese land to provide a better service and faster searches but you will have to collaborate by delivering information about your users when the Chinese government asks. If you resist like Google, the government filters the searches to your web site, sending back errors or taking several minutes in sending results… until people stop using you.

What could Google do? Give up on China? One-sixth of the world population? 110 million Internet users? Leave the market in the hands of local search engines such as Baidu when Microsoft and Yahoo had already accepted the conditions? Again, the same recurring question: Values or money?

Contradiction

In January 2006, Google caved in. A winning team: the world’s largest search engine with the world’s largest censor. Yes, it’s true: it had resisted bravely since 1998. And yes, unlike its competitors, it warned users that the results were filtered. But it caved in. And the problem is that, as we saw with eBay, once you start, it is hard to stop.

At Google’s shareholders’ meeting in May 2006, an affiliate of Amnesty International criticized Google for agreeing to be a censor for the Chinese government in an action that “makes Google a partner with one of the world’s most repressive regimes.”

Brin, who two years before had stated “Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served–as shareholders and in all other ways–by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short-term gains,” explained that:

“the consequence [of our resistance] was our service was significantly degraded. It wasn’t available in Chinese universities at all. When it was available it was slow…to the point that people stopped using it.”

In April, a month before that meeting, an iResearch report
stated that the Chinese search market was dominated by Baidu with a 56.8% share of searches, followed closely by a renewed and growing Google, with 32.8%, after amply beating Yahoo, with less than 5%.

Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.

Tomorrow: Kazaa

By David Blanco
Saved in: Internet, Quotes | No comments » | 23 September 2006