Google pulls out, China not pregnant

HI GUYS.

Little Sino-American business speculation for you today.

No doubt many of you have heard about Google's ultimatum to Beijing--quit asking us to censor our .cn portal results, or we'll pull up and leave the country, period--as a response to cyber-attacks into their private servers, possibly perpetrated by the government, possibly uncovering some moderately sensitive information about the Gmail accounts of some political dissidents. It's been hailed, predictably, as a triumph of ethics over profit, and a welcome return to Google's much-vaunted "Don't Be Evil" strategy; what's more, it's gotten the Western media excited because nobody has dared (so goes the story) to stand up to China before and it's fun to think of this event as a watershed.

I say, feihua [bullshit].

The story of Google in China is simple: compromises were made in order to gain access to a famously large and growing market, for obvious reasons. China has more users online than America has citizens, period. Chinese individuals are getting richer at a little under 10% per year, which means that those who are not the hundreds of millions of poor-ass farmers with no internet are raking in the disposable income like it's--well, it's unprecedented. So you can understand why when Google knocked on the door of the cadre whose job it is to tell giant foreign search engines what they have to do to get in on the pie, they were keen to play ball.

It's not obvious exactly how much ball they agreed to play. We know they censored their search results (which, incidentally, they do here too; check this out), but it's been suggested they also agreed to leave the spare key to a few important Gmail accounts under the mat. It seems to me the latter is not too far-fetched. But what's important is this: a security breach was allowed to occur, and when the PR people found out about it, they realized the optics of headlines like "Gmail Accounts Compromised in China, Yours Could Be Next" are a lot harder to swallow than those of "Chinese Political Dissidents Fucked Over, Chinese Government Still Evil and Has Nothing to Do With You". Given than Google had only managed about 25% of the search engine market share anyway, with 70% held by the established homebrew competition, and given that local servers are expensive and local users didn't generate as much ad revenue as expected, it seems sensible to me that they chose this moment to exit with a grand flourish and a slightly underhanded prestidigitation.

Google has put almost all its eggs in the "cloud computing" basket. I'm supposed to trust that my email, my calendar, my reading and purchasing habits, my documents, my finances, whatever the heck Wave is for, and someday my whole operating system are all safe and sound in Google servers across the world. If something happens to undermine that trust, maybe I switch back to using a more secure email, because I realize my online life is, actually, kinda sensitive. Maybe I don't want to end up like those Chinese dissidents, who trusted Gmail to be secure and are now up shit creek. So they make sure I never think of it that way. We all know the Chinese government does sketchy things, but only to its own people, right? Nothing to worry about out here in Google's home turf.

There's something about this deflection that unsettles me. By making sure we hear the story in terms we already understand and habitually ignore--political repression in China--Google's people have ensured that we don't see it in the terms that are relevant to our lives. Maybe that's the essence of effective misinformation: don't lie, exactly, but tell people the part of the story they already believe.

Anyway, that's it for me. Happy Googling!