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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 g

• omouse 17y ago
  They shouldn't have even opened an office in China. What the heck did they expect to happen?
  • JCThoughtscream 17y ago
    They expected to do business, of course. It is, after all, a 1.32bn audience base. Quite glad they're opting to take the ethical route this time, though.
    • code_devil 17y ago
      Well,the decision could also have been made along with the fact that they don't have a large user base. I am guessing "Baidu" is still pretty popular there. I wonder if they would have done the same if they had a 60% penetration in the Chinese market. EDIT: Why am I being downmodded ? I thought we are supposed to have open discussions here. (I did find the actual google mkt share in the TC blog later, but I was presenting an alternative reason along with the fact that their site was attacked)
      • pavs 17y ago
        Even if they have 5% market pulling out of china is huge. They currently have ~17% market share in China. No profit-making company in their right mind would pull out of country with ~17% market share.
        • lallysingh 17y ago
          s/profit-making/profit-centered/
          • shard 17y ago
            It's a public company's fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of it's stockholders, which in most cases is profit-centered (considering that the major holders of Google are investment funds and groups). It looks like after hours trading of GOOG is trending lower.
        • deleted 17y ago
          [deleted]
        • Frazzydee 17y ago
          Reference for 17% market share: http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/12/28/google-v-baidu-which-company-will-win-china/ http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/12/28/googl...
    • Radix 17y ago
      On top of a profitable business in China, Google now has some ability to leverage some change in China. At the least, other corporations and governments will reconsider their relationships or expectations of China. Google had no influence before they opened google.cn, and as netcan pointed out, it wouldn't have been very useful to show sites not viewable through the Great Firewall anyway. Business and an opportunity they didn't have before. Be charitable, this looks like a better outcome than had they stayed out of China altogether.
      • realitygrill 17y ago
        “The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.” Well, I wouldn't call Google's moves stupid, but this sure is a surprising outcome.
        • Radix 17y ago
          That is a perfect quote. Please tell me who it is attributed to. I tried to give you a point, but failed.
          • realitygrill 17y ago
            Gamal Abdel Nassar, second President of Egypt. Thanks for trying with the point; I'm new and I guess still provisional.
    • est 17y ago
      > a 1.32bn audience base With 0.4bn actual base (total amount of Chinese Internet users), others were 'represented' by the Party.
      • SapphireSun 17y ago
        0.4 bn = Population of the united states
    • tel 17y ago
      Additionally, they recruit heavily from China's top universities.
  • pavs 17y ago
    In case you didn't know. Google is not a charity, but a business organization. It would have been silly for them not to do business with China - when most western nations and companies does it. Some level of censorship does outweigh the benefits of having google.cn. But google being google, and perhaps the only company that has the balls to do this, will most likely pull out of china if they don't get their way. I can't think of any other company doing this, the potential for business is incredible in china, which has more internet users than USA. This is BIG.
    • netcan 17y ago
      Also, when you think about the concession they had to make, it wasn't all that big: Exclude from Google results any sites that cannot be viewed from China. That is arguably the right thing to do from a usability, if not from a political, perspective.
      • gridspy 17y ago
        There is a lot of information about search results in the title, summary and cached versions alone. If the results are "sensitive" to the government, that content is highly likely to contradict the sanitised history that is being handed down.
        • netcan 17y ago
          True. I don't doubt this at all. But.. imagine that the reason you couldn't reach these sites was not political (eg, pay wall). Wouldn't you want your search engine to give you ten links that work.
          • gridspy 17y ago
            Of course in this case it is about events such as citizens being run down by tanks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_19... "Currently, due to strong Chinese government censorship including Internet censorship, the news media are forbidden to report anything related to the protests. Websites related to the protest are blocked on the mainland.[94] A search for Tiananmen Square protest information on the Internet in Mainland China largely returns no results, apart from the government-mandated version of the events and the official view, which are mostly found on Websites of People's Daily and other heavily-controlled media.[95]" If Google was hiding links to US websites that blocked international traffic, fair play. But we are talking about sites that are blocked by government mandate.
  • chollida1 17y ago
    I imagine they expected to tap into some of the best computer science talent on the face of the earth. Just like they expected to do when they opened offices in Europe, Canada, etc.
  • lhuang 17y ago
    By this logic, why do business in a plethora of other questionable countries? Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc.
• deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
• ramchip 17y ago
  Come on. Don't upvote to 36+ a comment that just copies part of the article with "wow" after it. I'm not saying it's wrong and should be downvoted, but still...
  • enomar 17y ago
    I got upvoted because I was the first comment. I extracted the important part of a long blog post.