According to a variety of sources, including Google itself, it appears that Google has made a decision to pull all of its operations out of China. The official Google blog notes a number of cyber-attacks on Google infrastructure in China, apparently targeted at obtaining information about Chinese human rights activists, and notes:
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.
We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to 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’ll have more to say about this as news comes in — but it is pretty clear already that this is an important moment in the history of the Net, and in the history of the relationship between sovereign states and Internet services. If this stiffens Google’s resolve to put forth some conditions upon its continued presence in the Chinese market, it could be an important moment for Chinese politics and governance and free speech as well.
John smith says:
Good for them!
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January 12, 2010, 7:24 pmOff Kilter says:
Inspiring...
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January 12, 2010, 7:47 pmSoronel Haetir says:
I find the situation in China far less puzzling than what is currently going on in Australia. You expect that sort of behavior out of authoritarian states; but for it to occur in an ostensibly Western democracy is just mind boggling.
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January 12, 2010, 8:31 pmshortcoat says:
I worked in Shanghai for four or so years. The Google services there have always been spotty. The connection was unreliable and slow, and would cut out from time to time, even after the google.cn deal was reached. Operating as a foreign busness in china entails all kinds of abuse. Sounds like google finally got tired of all that bullshit.
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January 12, 2010, 8:33 pmyao says:
I had the same experience as shortcoat. The highlight was China blocking all of google for a couple days during their last dispute this past summer. After a few weeks of poor connections, blocked sites and spotty service, I dubbed the Chinese internet:
Shang Hai Information Technologies.
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January 12, 2010, 8:57 pmStratego says:
Good start. I hope American corporations loose all their money trying to support communists.
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January 12, 2010, 9:11 pmSteve says:
Manufacturers in China only make a small margin on their exports. This same principal goes for the majority of the country. Everything is done really cheap. China may have a billion people, but if they don’t have a lot of income to spend, it’s hard to make a lot of money. Google can’t achieve the advertising revenue shareholders expect and the Chinese market exposes to company to excess risk. It’s a smart move for the company and a great PR stunt.
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January 12, 2010, 10:22 pmPeterW says:
Note that Google has only a minority market share in China, with the lion’s share of the search business going to Baidu. Thus while it’s still a big risk for them, it’s not as big as it might seem at first glance.
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January 12, 2010, 11:17 pmJeff Walden says:
I’m not going to defend Google too strenuously — I think either choice would have been justifiable, if certainly distasteful — but their action seems a logical extension of the idea that they originally said, “Okay to censoring search results at a non-personal level, *not* okay to have any tampering with especially personal data or services”. This is China crossing that line drawn in the sand, and that seems to warrant Google pulling out of the deal. Arguably it would have been unprincipled not to have pulled out in response to this stepping over the line. Nevertheless, I’m surprised they actually followed through on implied conditions in what they clearly treat as an implied, binding commitment.
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January 12, 2010, 11:35 pmJeff Walden says:
The number I heard somewhere was Google had 25% in China; it might be minority share, but that’s still nothing to sneeze at! I suspect any business would be more than happy to have 25% market share in that large a market any day.
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January 12, 2010, 11:39 pmBrian G. says:
This decision will last only if Google has determined that China is not profitable. No way they would throw away a significant amount of money on principle.
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January 13, 2010, 12:27 amSteve P. says:
Google has struggled in China for a while. They negotiated a deal with the government to censor some things in order to stay online, but service is everything, and every time they get shut down Chinese eyes go to a different site.
Originally I was optimistic, because I love the idea of a company with the clout of Google possibly nudging the Chinese government towards a more open country. Great PR stunt, as the Steve above notes (no relation).
I’m still hopeful, but not optimistic. China brings thousands of new eyes to the Internet daily, and while many of those new eyes don’t have the purchasing power of Americans, as a collective they’re pretty strong. Google ditched a very large market that’s growing at a rate we envy.
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January 13, 2010, 1:28 amLior says:
Until they remove .cn sites from their index (which I think they should), “pulling out of China” is basically an empty gesture. The location of their business units after all is mostly a choice-of-law issue, not related to the actual search experience.
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January 13, 2010, 1:43 amRicardo says:
If Google isn’t getting the advertising revenue it wants, it’s probably because of the dominance of Baidu. I can tell you that if you go to a high-end restaurant or a high-margin business like Starbucks or a name-brand retail store, it isn’t going to be empty and most of the patrons will be Chinese. The kinds of people who use the internet a lot in China are probably the ones with higher-than-average disposable income. There is a lot of money to be made by targeting the people with money in China.
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January 13, 2010, 1:49 amShane says:
That’s not quite right. Having Chinese servers with Chinese IP addresses and a .cn domain is an improved experience for Chinese users. Google made a forecast on how much uptime they would have if they created a Chinese subsidiary, compared it to the forecast on how much uptime regular google.com would have in China (as perceived from China), and made a decision towards what they believed would be better reliability. It hasn’t turned out to be as good as they’d hoped.
And as for other people saying that “Oh Google wasn’t doing too hot in China anyway; they only controlled 30% of the search market” are missing the point. China is a rapidly growing economy and will probably become the world’s largest economy someday, and being a significant player in that market is worth something. It doesn’t cost Google much on the margins to operate in China — but this move could be potentially costly in revenue loss. This move doesn’t make short term (or even medium term) business sense, but it might be valuable signaling to many different players in the game and help Google long-term. Or it might not.
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January 13, 2010, 2:59 amDaveM says:
Reading between the lines of the Google blog post (some technical guesses):
- It sounds like google realized that attacks against the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents was being launched from inside google’s own Chinese servers.
- Hijacking google’s own servers could probably only be done by the Chinese government, or at least with its active assistance.
- Therefore, to allow operations in China is to expose the internal google network to attack by the Chinese government. Google guards its “secret sauces” very, very carefully. Their search algorithms are highly proprietary. But there’s no fighting City Hall. The only safe option may be to pull out.
Sounds sad, but DON’T think the same thing can’t happen here; it already has. AT&T reportedly lets the US government scan every byte of data that is transmitted over the Internet backbone. If the US government were as hostile as China’s, google would have to pull out of here, too.
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January 13, 2010, 3:48 amMusic Man says:
Probably it’s the right thing to do. The losers will be the Chinese public (who will have to use Baidu or Yahoo).
Google also runs top100.cn, which is the world’s best source for free and legal MP3s from bigname international artists.
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January 13, 2010, 4:02 amvivek says:
Finally google proves that ethics are way more important than minting money. This will definitly spark up the human right activist in China as well as around the world. CIIRC will now have something to think over.
Also the fact can’t be ignored that google was unable to cope with Baidu. Its better to loose either business or ethics. Google if stayed more, must have definitely lost both of it. Now at least the ETHICS are intact.
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January 13, 2010, 4:05 amGoogle vs. China | Verfassungsblog says:
[...] Markus Beckedahl. Oder in den Worten von David Post auf Volokh Conspiracy: it is pretty clear already that this is an important moment in the history of the Net, and in the [...]
Max Hailperin says:
I too had been wondering whether there was a technical rather than merely tit-for-tat connection between the security breach and the change in Google’s operations in China. Even if there is, I think DaveM’s speculation is a bit off base. Although he presents the chain of reasoning that I numbered [1], [2], [3] as running in the forward (deductive) direction, it really worked backwards (inductively) for him; from the observation [3], he was speculating upon [1] and [2]. So the reasoning only is even inductively correct if item [3], the starting point, is a correct observation. But item [3] is incorrect; Google did not say it was pulling out of China, but rather that it was going to talk with China about whether it could stay on an uncensored basis; it would pull out if not.
As such, if there is any technical connection, it can’t be with the mere presence in China, but rather with the censoring. For example, suppose Google has supported that censoring by giving the Chinese government a private means for uploading the “black list” of items for Google to censor. Suppose that that private means had some vulnerability, in which by sending an appropriately crafted message on that connection, the Chinese government could breach the security of that specific Google server. Once that specific server running the black-list upload service was breached, it could be used as a starting point for a chain of other actions breaching the perhaps weaker security barriers within Google’s networks, and eventually even moving outbound from Google to conduct unrelated industrial espionage at other US companies.
If, and this is a big if, this scenario is correct (that the initial entry point for the various security breaches was the black-list upload service), then presumably Google would immediately have patched that particular vulnerability and conducted a security audit to try and make sure there weren’t other vulnerabilities on that channel — hence their stated willingness to talk with China over a period of weeks about how they are going to move forward. (I am assuming, though it isn’t explicit in the Google blog post, that during this period of weeks, the censorship is continuing as usual.)
But, continuing with the big if, Google wouldn’t have stopped with just tightening the security on that private black-list-uploading back door that they gave the Chinese government. They would be asking themselves, should we continue to give these guys a back door at all, however tightly controlled? Isn’t that just playing cat and mouse with them and asking for continued, more sophisticated, trouble? That line of reasoning (coupled with the non-technical dimensions) could explain the decision to move away from the censoring. They would effectively be saying: if you want to break in, you’re going to need to do it through the same interfaces as we expose to all other attackers.
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January 13, 2010, 8:43 amRandy says:
vivek: “Finally google proves that ethics are way more important than minting money.”
I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Having google in China greatly increased the amount of information available to the public. Pulling out only hurts the chinese public without affecting their overall revenues all that much. It’s unfortunate that they might have to pull out, but I have met some of the Chinese google people, and they have a high regard for balancing the public’s access to information and the government’s desire to restrict it. Overall, they felt it better to be there as a presence for openness, limited though it is.
Progress in restrictive countries like this isn’t made by turning our backs upon them, but by engaging them in world commerce and having them realize that they need to play by the same rules as everyone else if they want to advance in the world.
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January 13, 2010, 10:27 amMax Hailperin says:
There is apparently some evidence to the contrary.
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January 13, 2010, 10:58 amChas C-Q says:
It was beer-and-skittles, up to the moment Google discovered itself to be the target of China’s criminality. Way to not be evil. </sarc>
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January 13, 2010, 1:00 pmDaveM says:
Some interesting quotes from the linked article:
I agree with Kaminsky. I host several servers in a data center, and can attest that attacks are commonplace and relentless.
“Something big” has probably happened for Google to react so categorically.
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January 13, 2010, 1:06 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Google pulling out of China? -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Justin Mancinelli, Eugene Volokh. Eugene Volokh said: Google pulling out of China?: According to a variety of sources, including Google itself, it appears that Googl.. http://bit.ly/7CXGmS [...]
Kris Nelson says:
Please pardon my ignorance — I worked at an ISP for a year and so only slightly understand this. My friend spent a year-and-a-half in Asia setting up ISPs and helping to run networks and he has only just explained to me how the giant switching buildings run.
Why can’t China just make up their own Google type company if they want to restrict stuff from the public? Why do they need Google at all, except to hook up with outside information?
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January 14, 2010, 12:13 am