The people at Google had a motto, though you don’t hear much of it any more: Don’t be evil. It looks like we can judge them for what they do, not what they say, because they warned China that they’d leave if the Chinese government wouldn’t enforce sanctions or investigate ongoing hacking activities within their borders, and against such targets as U.S. corporations, government agencies, universities – and search engines.
As I’ve said before: Google was hacked. By people looking for information. On Chinese dissidents.
Gee, I wonder who could have done that.
So Google closed up shop in China, shuttering its physical presence and forwarding its Google.cn site to Google.hk, where uncensored searches could still be performed. You could see this as walking away from a market of what’s rapidly approaching half a billion internet users.
Or you could see it as crazy like a fox. There’s a reason Google Can’t Be Evil. They’re all about transparency, availability and accessibility of information. They pwn all of us, and we all know it. The minute they look like they’re trying to hide something – ANYthing – they lose their most critical asset.
Our trust.
Thus Bravo, Google, for choosing trust over money. Those Chinese users aren’t going away; they’ll be remembering for a long time that it was Google that tried to make information free. And their own government that tried to hide it.