Google’s threat to exit China wins praise
By Matt at 13 January, 2010, 1:46 pm
It’s a critical time for Google as attacks came flying in on its email service in China.
Most of the negative news in the past from China is regarding poisonous exported products or human rights violations, this time the accusation is that they attacked a foreign multinational corporation to collect intelligence (… they spied).
Google didn’t directly accuse the Chinese of the attack but the outline they gave, (see David Drummond’s Blog – Google SVP), made it clear.
After outlining the attacks and threats, Mr. Drummond went on to say:
We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.
What Google then went on to say has drawn massive praise from people both inside and outside China:
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.
I guess that means that the ball is in China’s court and so we’ll watch this space. Until then take a look at Broom’s blog post which makes some very interesting points (some in Chinglish).
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