In 2002 Chinese government decided to shut down all access to Google. Sergey Brin was no expert on international diplomacy. So he ordered a half-dozen books about Chinese history, business, and politics and splurged on overnight shipping. He consulted with Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and David Drummond, Google's general counsel and head of business development, and then put in a call to tech industry doyenne Esther Dyson for advice and contacts. Google had no offices in China, so Brin enlisted go-betweens to get the message to Chinese authorities that Google would be very interested in working out a compromise to restore access.
Brin and other Google executives realized that the Chinese firewall allowed them only two choices, neither of which they relished. If Google remained aloof and continued to run its Chinese site from foreign soil, it would face slowdowns from the firewall and the threat of more arbitrary blockades — and eventually, the loss of market share to Baidu and other Chinese search engines. If it opened up a Chinese office and moved its servers onto Chinese territory, it would no longer have to fight to get past the firewall, and its service would speed up. But then Google would be subject to China's self-censorship laws. Brin and his executives began discussing exactly which compromises they could tolerate. They decided that — unlike Yahoo and Microsoft — they would not offer e-mail or blogging services inside China, since that could put them in a position of being forced to censor blog postings or hand over dissidents' personal information to the secret police. They also decided they would not take down the existing, unfiltered Chinese-language version of the google.com engine. In essence, they would offer two search engines in Chinese.
Chinese surfers could still access the old google.com; it would produce uncensored search results, though controversial links would still lead to dead ends, and the site would be slowed down and occasionally blocked entirely by the firewall. The new option would be google.cn, where the results would be censored by Google — but would arrive quickly, reliably and unhindered by the firewall. When Chinese users search for forbidden terms, Brin said, "they can notice what's missing, or at least notice the local control."
Background links:
Google censors itself for China, BBC, January 25, 2006
Google move 'black day' for China, BBC, January 25, 2006
Google to censor itself in China, CNN, January 26, 2006
David Kirkpatrick, Google founder defends China portal, Fortune, January 25, 2006
Josh McHugh, Google vs. Evil, Wired, January 2003
Clive Thompson, Google's China Problem (and China's Google Problem), The New York Times, April 23, 2006
Matthew Forney, China's Web Watchers, Time, October 3, 2005
Last week in China - Google Searches In and Outside China and Other News, Search Engine Journal, April 27, 2007
