Google takes a stand and tells China to go censor itself

In its meteoric rise, Google hasn’t made many mistakes.

A company doesn’t go from two guys and a $100,000 investment to a $40-billion enterprise with almost 20,000 employees in a dozen years by dropping very many balls.

So the temptation is to wonder whether Google knows something about playing hardball with China that others don’t, or whether Google has made its first big mistake.

Regardless, Google deserves credit — although it’s not getting much on the stock market — for putting its foot down.

The company announced in January that it wasn’t interested in functioning as the censor for China’s authoritarian regime any more. And this week it made good on its pledge.

Google shifted the entry point for its Chinese search engine from a mainland site that it had censored in accordance with Chinese law, to a Hong Kong site that operates more freely.

Essentially, Google told China that if it wanted to deny its people access to information on the Internet, it could take responsibility for the censorship. China responded by doing just that and by excoriating Google as a scofflaw.

China’s “Great Firewall” is working overtime now, blocking access to Google searches for subjects including Falun Gong, the outlawed religious movement, Taiwan, Tibet and the democracy movement.

Backlash

The Associated Press reported that a high-profile Communist Party newspaper skewered Google in a front-page story, and some of Google’s partners and advertising customers in the country appeared to be distancing themselves from the company. Inquiring Chinese minds are getting more and more “page cannot be displayed” error messages on their screens. Meanwhile Google is losing some of its inroads into other information technology areas.

Google is either gambling that it can rehabilitate its standing with China’s government and in the Chinese market place, or it is acknowledging without yet saying so that China is becoming a more sophisticated economy, one that is increasingly intent on favoring home-grown technology over imports.

If that’s the case — and it’s only one of many theories — Google would be one of the first to suggest that there isn’t a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for companies that have been crawling over each other for decades, anticipating the day of the big payoff.

It’s worth noting that Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and the company CEO, Eric Schmidt, are putting their money where their mouths are in standing up to China. All have been on salaries of $1-a-year since 2005, meaning their fortunes, and that of many Google employees, are tied directly to the company’s stock performance.

They may think that their principled stand will pay off in China in the long run, or that in a highly restricted Chinese economy there wasn’t that much for an outsider to lose. The least likely explanation is that this is one of Google’s famous April Fools’ Day jokes.