Google cofounder Sergey Brin is having second thoughts about the firm’s China deal, in which Google agreed to censor sites listed by the Chinese government. Many of these banned sites are political or religious in nature. When Google first announced the deal, many were critical of it as a contradiction of Google’s stated policy to “do no evil.” The wire story notes:
Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged Tuesday the dominant Internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course.
This is a dilemma in several ways. From a purely business standpoint, meeting China’s demands would seem to be a no-brainer, presuming that other search engines also follow the same restrictions. Even from a moral standpoint, one can argue for both sides (although the Chinese side comes up a bit short, in my opinion).
Global businesses opererate under the laws of the countries they work in. They pay local taxes, they follow local employment laws, and so on. Governments may even try to restrict information flow. Sometimes these attempts are heavy handed and laughable, like the French attempt to ensure that all websites were in French or the German judge who shut down Wikipedia. Sometimes government controls on information may be accepted as reasonable by the vast majority of people, as in restricting distribution of child pornography.
The principle of following a host country’s laws is based on the assumption that the government is working in the best interests of its citizens. Every nation has misguided laws and regulations, but most of them can be rationalized as being well-intentioned. Sometimes, the benign nature of a nation’s government and the good intention of its laws are suspect. Perhaps the best example of this in recent memory was South Africa of a few decades ago. This was a prosperous and efficient country, but a good portion of its laws were highly discriminatory and geared to subjugating its black citizens. Firms that wanted to operate there had to follow local laws. While they could interpret these in more liberal ways than local firms who believed in the laws, multinationals were faced often faced with violating local laws or engaging in behavior that would be considered unjust or immoral in the US or Europe. Some took the “constructive engagement” approach, at least until pressure from shareholders and consumers forced them to pull out of the country.
So where does Google’s China arrangement fit in the good/evil spectrum? Is it more like France’s goofy but fairly harmless attempts to control the world’s information, or closer to South Africa’s effort to force companies to conform to morally repugnant standards.
I think the answer is somewhere in between. Asking Google to censor potentially harmful content like bomb-making instructions or terrorist forums might be a reasonable request. Attempting to filter vast numbers of sites that feature opinions, religious beliefs, etc., and in no way are advocating violence, armed insurrection, etc. is not reasonable. That’s not to say that a business shouldn’t conform to that law – but a business that professes to “do no evil” will have to do some serious soul-searching.
The AP story suggests that Brin, at least, sees this conflict.
One thing the story doesn’t cover is Google’s data store of information about Chinese users. Multiple Google software items now live on the user’s computer and have the potential to keep a record of not just searches, but every site and page visited by the user. Google even provides software for indexing and searching the user’s own hard drive, though as far as we know this tool doesn’t “phone home” with data about the user’s files… yet. Google’s access to vast amounts of user data could be attractive to a government like that of China, and demands for user data could make the censorship issue pale by comparison.
