Google and the Great Chinese Firewall
Robert O Boorstin
Director, Corporate and Policy Communications, Google

The kinds of problems I am going to talk about are not confined to China.  We have had them in Thailand, in Turkey, in Pakistan - all over the world.  Basically, wherever there is a government that is not fond of free expression,  we  have a problem.  We have these problems every week, sometimes every day. And we are learning slowly, as a company that is not yet 10 years old, how to deal with these questions.

Ours is quite a dynamic industry and a moving target, which is something I think everyone has to understand from the beginning. What is today's technology that can get you through a firewall may be useless tomorrow or may in fact be adopted by a government tomorrow and turned around on you. And so a great deal of the solutions that people have come up with turn out to be great solutions for several months and then not to work any more.

I am going to focus my presentation on four questions. Why do we operate in China? What responsibilities do we have?  What challenges do we face? And what would you do?

Why do we operate in China?  Let me not be disingenuous here. We operate in China because we are a business. There are 230 million at last count Internet users in China. There are 400 million mobile phones, soon to be 600 million in a couple of years. And that means good business for companies in the information and technology sector if they can thread the needle and figure out how to operate in China.  And that is a very difficult thing to do.

The second reason we are there is because we view it as part of our mission to organize the world's information, make it universally accessible and useful to people. If we were to ignore 1.3 billion people that would mean that we would not be doing our mission very well. The more accurate question when I say why do we do business there is really why do we operate Google.cn, which is our Chinese domain? In a perfect world there would be one Google, Google.com, that showed everything that everyone in the world had access to.  Unfortunately that world does not exist. And the reason that we operate Google.cn, and I'll give you a little history behind this, is simply that we really did not have any choice if we want to operate in China.

Google had and still has Google.com in Chinese. And for a long time you could actually see it when you were inside China. Then over the course of about a year it started to disappear. People were having great trouble getting to it, or seeing it at all. And for those who did get through, it was degraded severely. It was very slow in coming up. People got very impatient and over time the company realized that our service was being strangled, and that if we were going to continue to have a service in China we would have to come up with something else.

There was a year-long debate inside Google - and I should say that the debate still continues - over whether or not we should be operating within the Chinese government's rules. Ultimately, we made the decision that we would start Google.cn under the self-censorship rules that the Chinese government imposes for any company that operates this kind of service.

The best way to think about why we did this is to imagine that you were given the chance to open a public library for 230 million people, and you were told you could issue all these library cards but you could not show the people the back room. There was one room in that library with materials they could not see, but they could see 98 percent of the materials that were available. That really was the choice that we faced. Either we opened Google.cn and we gave people access to 98 per cent of what we could get up on Google, or they could see nothing at all. Again, remember how degraded our service had become there. It was a critical reason why we set this up.

What responsibilities do we have as a company operating there? Let me focus on just a few. We think that our duty as a company is to maximize freedom of expression and access to information. I think that is pretty clear in our mission, and I think the word maximize is critical here. Again, in a perfect world one would not have to use that word. One would be able to say we are going to give everything to everyone.  But in this case in order to operate, what we tried to do was to give people the most that was possible under the local circumstances.

A second responsibility we believe we have is transparency, that is to tell people when they are not getting the full story. And so from the beginning, when Google.cn went live, we have had a statement at the bottom of the page, when you make a certain search, which tells you that  certain search sites or results have been eliminated because of government regulations. We thought that was a very important thing to tell people. Was it a perfect solution? No, but at least it was a partial solution.

A third responsibility we have is to protect our users' personally identifiable information and their privacy. And that is why from the beginning we have not put information on servers in China that could be linked to people directly. It is why we do not offer gmail or blogger services in China, because if we were to do so we would end up with a situation where the government could come to us and demand information and could shut us down if we did not turn it over. We have chosen not to put ourselves in that situation.

A fourth responsibility is to challenge the government when we think that they are making an unreasonable request or when it simply makes sense to do so to find out more about what the regulations are.  Some of the regulations are very hard to interpret, to understand.  And so we try to ask as often as we can how they will apply.

Finally not only in China but also outside that country we feel that have a responsibility to press for human rights in as many forums as we can.

What challenges do we face in China? Well they are innumerable. We face a difficult market, one that is hard to understand. We do not know with the government where we stand from day to day. We face a huge number of regulations and licensing problems. You would be surprised at the number of lawyers and the number of Google employees that are involved in simply getting us to certain stages where we are able to offer services.

We face what I can only call a bias towards Chinese companies. This is one story that I will tell. Back in October of 2007 there was I guess what you can call the perfect storm. Within a couple of weeks the National Peoples' Congress happened, we opened a YouTube Taiwan channel - that's always helpful, in Beijing - and the Congress in the United States awarded the Medal of Freedom to the Dalai Lama. All within two weeks. And we noticed suddenly that all of Google's traffic, all of Yahoo's traffic and all of MSN traffic had been redirected to Baidu (the Chinese search engine), and it remained that way for 18 hours. I thought that was a fairly simple thing to interpret myself.  But that is the kind of challenge that we do face. When you typed in Google, you got Baidu. And that's quite an interesting moment for any company to be dealing with.
 
Finally - and this is something I would say is not unique to Google but certainly we have an unusual volume of it - we have a lot of internal questioning among our employees. There was a great deal of controversy about our operations there and a great deal of discussion still goes on within the company. We think that this is pretty healthy and it keeps us on our toes. And we also think it is healthy because we said when we went in with Google.cn that we would constantly review our operations depending on how conditions in China changed.

Let me end with the last question. What would you do? Put yourselves in the shoes of somebody who is facing a situation, let's say in Thailand where the government has shut down all of YouTube because of four videos that have offended the king. Do you make the choice of taking You Tube down and showing nothing. Or do you talk to the government, negotiate and eventually take down the four videos so that YouTube can be broadcast again? That is the kind of question we face every day, and it is the kind of question that I think we all should be thinking about.