Comment: Google's necessary evil

Posted on 10 Mar 2006 at 16:21

The trouble with becoming a giant in your chosen field is that your responsibilities grow in line with your status. Whereas mid-sized companies can focus on increasing their bottom lines without having to make philanthropic gestures, the big guys have to play a careful marketing game that balances huge profits with an accessible, friendly side to keep customers on board.

The cynic inside me suggests this is the reason behind the new 'corporate social responsibility' culture that's gripping the IT world. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates gives more money to charity than anyone else, PC manufacturers like Dell and HP are increasingly looking to produce 'green' PCs, and Google keeps banging on about not being evil. But despite such promises, big companies still fall foul of the unwritten rules.

The fact that Google has grown into a mega-corporation seems to have become conventional wisdom over the past two years, and PC Pro has jumped aboard the Page and Brin bandwagon: our feature last year weighed up the pros and cons of Google's dominance (see issue 134, p136). The difference between Google and other giants of industry is that it has made a huge deal of its commitment to purity since its very beginnings. But that 'don't be evil' line has been banded around enough times now that most people disregard it as a piece of naive idealism that's tricky to maintain in a dog-eat-dog environment dominated by lawyers, takeovers and shareholders.

And it seems you can't maintain customer goodwill if you want to make any sort of headway in the Chinese market - the enormity of which dictates that any global IT business would be foolish not to explore the potential for setting up an office there. It's a fast-growing economy with a fast-growing Internet population that comes second only to the US in terms of the sheer number of people regularly going online.

But IT companies hopeful of getting a piece of the action must offset this with the fact that China censors the Internet with such a ferocity that more than 60 people are imprisoned there for expressions on the Web, according to the Human Rights Watch World Report for 2005. Restrictions over publishing, the Internet and even text messaging have increased over the past year as a result of growing uneasiness within the Chinese Communist Party about the scale of the dangers of Net freedom.

Last September, the Ministry of Information Industry and the State Council unleashed new regulations on Internet news, which prevent the distribution of any uncensored version of a news event or commentary. The move affected Internet portals, email systems and SMS.

Net users in China face sophisticated filters, registration of all personal domestic websites and personal responsibility for all content, meaning the Internet behind the so-called Great Firewall of China is far removed from the Web we see. For an IT company in the Western world, cutting a deal with the Chinese government to help set up a business there requires huge concessions.

And yet everybody's favourite e-commerce giant has backed down and agreed to censor its search results in order to gain greater access to Chinese web surfers. The new Chinese language version - to be found at www.google.cn - has been adapted to satisfy Beijing's hard-line approach to the availability of information. That means you're unlikely to get many hits if you type 'Taiwanese independence' into the search engine while sitting in an Internet cafe in Shanghai. Google claims that providing censored results is more consistent with its bid to make information universally accessible than providing no information, but this argument has fallen on deaf ears.