Opinion Google’s bad conscience in China

Back in early December when Schmidt shared this insight with the wider audience,Google was forcefully marching toward world domination. Fast forward just a few weeks — and its seemingly unstoppable quest has been unexpectedly stalled in what appears to be the world’s most promising advertising market: China.

How did this come about? Google’s own version of events sounds like an overwrought case study from Harvard Business School: A series of devastating cyberattacks on email accounts of critics of the Chinese government made Google executives painfully aware of the risks of operating in China.

The executives were nothing but furious — so furious that they awoke from their ethical coma,broke their earlier agreement with the Chinese government and stopped censoring search results for controversial political queries.

If Google’s explanations and actions seem to be lacking in logic and coherence,it’s because they are.

By pulling out of China — a prospect that now looks inevitable,as Chinese authorities are not likely to change their laws to acquiesce a foreign company — Google would not make itself any safer from future cyberattacks.

Short of purging its servers of all accounts of Chinese human rights activists,or folks who talk and look like them,Google would continue bearing many of the costs of operating in China even if no longer there physically.

So if the sudden change of mind on the issue of censorship was not driven by cybersecurity,what could explain Google’s appetite for self-destruction?

The most plausible explanation seems to be that this is Google’s own,uber-geeky way of doing penance for the evil bargain that it struck with the Chinese government in 2005. In retrospect,it’s easy to see where Google’s purely utilitarian calculations went wrong. In addition to their “do no evil” motto,Googlers have always been guided by another,much less explicit philosophy: “computational arrogance.”

A company started by talented computer scientists and engineers,Google carefully applied its scientific,heavily quantitative methods to every single business decision and quandary,from book digitisation to freedom of expression. This is how they came to reason that having more books online — even if distributed under an inferior copyright regime — is better than having none. Similarly,this is how they reasoned that having more information online in China — even if some of it is mediocre or censored — is better than none. Reasoning by common sense or intuition is not really an option here: Googlers seem to check all hunches,no matter how good,by their cubicles,for spreadsheets never lie.

But China,too,has plenty of engineers,especially in the Party leadership. The Chinese leaders may lag behind Google in matters of computer science,but they are surely ahead in the art of Machiavellian politics.

It wouldn’t be surprising if they followed a very similar thought process: Having mediocre information about human rights activists is better than no information. And who would be better suited to organise it all — to be hacked by China’s own hackers at some point in the future — than the overly ambitious Google engineers?

Guided mostly by its spreadsheets,not historical analysis,Google took the bait and struck a deal with the government,a deal of which very little is known. We do know that Google agreed to censor certain search results. But was there also something else that Google never told us about? The presence of,perhaps,a backdoor to user data — which may have been abused by the third-parties — could explain Google’s near certainty that Chinese authorities are behind the cyberattacks.

Of course,had Googlers paused to look up from their monitors and learn more about China and its leaders,they would have discovered that the government’s demands for more censorship — not to mention cyberattacks on Google’s own users — would only be getting stronger and more frequent. But Google was too arrogant to notice that. What,after all,could have possibly gone wrong?

At worst,it was expecting the new censorship regime to produce a harmless Baby Frankenstein. Instead,it is now dealing with an out-of-control full-fledged cybermonster that only obeys its Chinese overlords.

Still,the truth remains that Google failed to do due diligence on China and should bear full responsibility for it. It is unlikely to succeed in whitewashing its business blunders by trumpeting its newly acquired respect for human rights and freedom of expression.

The lesson that other Internet companies should draw from Google’s painful and mysterious compromises with authoritarian governments is rather simple: If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know,maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. Now,if only someone would tell that to Eric Schmidt.