Google' s Brave New Approach to China

by Dan Costa

Lines have been drawn, lines have been crossed, and now there is no way Google can ethically continue to operate Google.cn under the "laws" set down by the Chinese government. For that matter, Microsoft and Yahoo had better start doing some soul-searching of their own, or prepare to yield much more than just the moral high-ground.

For Google.cn to succeed, either Google needed to accept the Chinese government's control of its core business, or that government had to allow Google to deliver the world's knowledge to its citizens. Google played along for a while, but recent events show that even the tempting lure of a billion new consumers isn't worth playing the role of the Chinese government's toady.

This isn't something that I take joy in. I was hopeful that as international technology companies began to operate inside China, there would be an exchange of ideas and a growing tolerance on the part of the government. Instead, an army of government censors—by some estimates 30,000 of them—continue to redact the Web with the forced cooperation of Microsoft, Yahoo, and until this week, Google.

It is important to look at what exactly prompted Google's public withdrawal. It wasn't just the standard censorship that all companies must accept to operate in country. Google was used to that. No, it was the discovery of a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on [its] corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property." Since Google's announcement, representatives from Adobe said their company was attacked in a similar fashion, most likely through a zero-day attack that exploited an Internet Explorer vulnerability.

No one will say this was a government-sponsored or condoned attack, but the hackers were after more than just intellectual property. They wanted to spy on Chinese dissidents. David Drummond, Google's SVP, corporate development and chief legal officer, wrote in a post, "We have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists."

After a little more digging, Google found that dozens of human rights advocates across the world have had their accounts accessed by third parties. Now, who would want to spy on human rights activists that frequently criticize the Chinese government?

The Chinese government's priority here is to control its population at any cost. As Wang Chen, China's director of the State Council Information Office, said in a question-and-answer session with reporters, after Google's announcement, "Effective guidance of public opinion on the Internet is an important way of protecting the security of online information."