Tag Archives: china

TechCrunch, Don’t Be Smug: Google did the “Right Thing®”

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So TechCrunch thinks Google bailed on China because the going was just too tough. They weren’t the market share leader and had so much to lose that they backed out of the most promising market in the history of the Internet in order to stop the “bleeding.”  I tend to disagree with that assessment.

Why, if Google were so afraid of wasteful business practices that they would pull out of their biggest growth market for content products, would they be involved in similarly valueless gambits?  Take things like GoogleVoice, Google Wave, the cloud, Android, and projects like that.  These aren’t profitable ventures for Google, but may indeed become so at some point, especially Android and Voice.  The point is, Google spends all kinds of money on things that make folks scratch their head because they believe there’s money to be made.

China is no different, except that something clear scared the balls off of Google in the process. Be it the communist secret police or a blackmail offer that would’ve been even more embarrassing to Google than the Chinese government-backed breach of Gmail they just revealed, SOMETHING scared Google away from the biggest treasure trove of the next decade.  And that something was big. Yet to believe TechCrunch’s assessment, you’d have to assume the move was purely profit-driven and not really borne of any moralistic decision.  Again, I tend to disagree.  Profit decision or not, at the end of the day, Google DID THE RIGHT THING.  Why is it so hard for all these young pay-per-post bloggers to understand we’re talking about brutal social communism?

So TechCrunch’s echoing of the silly notion that China is a bad market for Google because it’s just too hard for them—ahh, that’s justy a goofy idea.  Have you ever known Google to back down from a market fight? Me neither.  If you answer no, then TechCrunch advises you to “sit the hell down and shut the hell up”.  They should rename their web site BlowHard.

Somebody call Mike Arrington and hook his writers up with Critical Thinking 101 at the local community college.

Three Cheers for Google as it Eats its Own Words Regarding China

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It’s too bad it took the Chinese Government botnetting Google in order to get them to realize the importance of free expression to a country like China, struggling to break bloodlessly free from the Chinese communist party.  Google has decided to no longer censor the search results on Google’s Chinese portal. But it’s also embarrassing to me, as an American, to see how much care has been taken by Google not to piss off China in their wording of the official response.

…advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

What Google won’t say here, and I don’t know why, is this. Who besides the Chinese government has an unhealthy interest in the e-mail communications of Chinese human rights activists?  Those “third parties” Google mentioned were probably the Guoanbu and the MSS, two Chinese agencies that, if you’re a human rights activist (or a salvation-believing Christian), you do NOT want to mess with.

But Google is on the right track. Responding to China, saying they’re willing to shut down operations in China if the archaic Chinese governing class aren’t willing to cave on the issue of censorship, is a good move.  But why wait until now?  I was heartbroken when Google capitulated to China’s censorship demands in the name of the Almighty Buck.  I even chided Google as un-American.

So putting teeth behind this fiasco–great move.   I would advise the Obama Administration to take a cue from Google’s chief counsel, who wrote their official response, and grow some teeth of their own as Google has done.  Hillary Clinton’s response from the Department of State was neither as informed nor as smart.  In fact, I’d call it useless.

James Fallows adds that, at the end of the day, this decision doesn’t really hurt anybody except Google.  It doesn’t deal a real blow to China, in his opinion, because Chinese Internet consumers are, generally speaking, not going to work too hard to get around the government’s censorship.  As one Tweeter put it, it’s not Google withdrawing from China.  It’s China withdrawing from the world. To me, that means Google is finally, thankfully, just doing the right thing.