Google China

» see google.cn as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In March 2010 I read about Google walking out of China from a country where YouTube had been blocked for almost two years. The Turkish ban ran from May 2008 to October 2010 and it was not a headline about somewhere else, it was the state of the internet on my own connection. So the argument about whether a company should operate a censored search engine did not arrive as an abstraction. It arrived as a question I already had a local version of.

Google.cn went live in January 2006. Google had been serving China from outside the country before that, through google.com, and the traffic kept getting throttled or blocked at the border until the service was unusable. The internal argument that won was that a Chinese-hosted Google that removed some results would still be better for Chinese users than a foreign-hosted one they could not reach. Google agreed to filter, and it did one thing its competitors did not: it put a notice at the bottom of the page saying results had been removed to comply with local law.

That notice was the whole moral position, and it was thin enough that everyone said so at the time. Google had already hired Kai-Fu Lee out of Microsoft in the summer of 2005 to build and run the operation, which produced a lawsuit from Microsoft before the search page even existed. In April 2006 Eric Schmidt stood up in Beijing and announced the company's Chinese name, Gu Ge, which translates roughly as valley song. It landed badly enough that a website appeared for the sole purpose of collecting complaints about it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the deal ~

The bargain never paid off commercially. Baidu had the home advantage and it never lost it. At its best, in 2009 and 2010, Google held somewhere around a third of Chinese search against Baidu's sixty-odd percent, which is a respectable second place in a market where second place earns you the ongoing cost of being the foreign company that agreed to censor.

The list of removed subjects was the one everybody could guess. Tiananmen sat at the top of it, with Falun Gong and Tibetan independence underneath, and below those anything about the leadership that read as criticism. Employees inside the company had known since 2006 that the arrangement would eventually have to be defended in public, and the version of the defense they had was that engagement beat absence. That argument holds right up until the other party stops keeping its side.

~ the day it died ~

In December 2009 Google discovered an intrusion into its own infrastructure. The operation was later named Aurora and it hit dozens of other companies too, but the part that mattered to Google was the target: the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Somebody had gone past the search results and into the mail.

On 12 January 2010 David Drummond published a post titled "A new approach to China" saying Google would stop censoring google.cn and would leave the country entirely if that proved impossible. Ten weeks of negotiation produced nothing, and on 22 March 2010 the redirect went in. Anyone typing google.cn was sent to google.com.hk, where they got unfiltered results in simplified Chinese from a server the Chinese government did not control. The Great Firewall then filtered them on the way back, which meant the searches worked and the sensitive results still did not load. Google had stopped doing the censoring. The censoring had not stopped.

~ the long tail ~

On 30 June 2010 Google dropped the automatic redirect and replaced it with a landing page carrying a link to Hong Kong, because an automatic redirect was going to cost the company its ICP license. The license was renewed on 9 July. Google.cn survived as a stub for years afterward, a page that existed to point at somewhere else.

By November 2013 Google's share of Chinese search was 1.7 percent. Gmail was blocked outright in December 2014. The market share went to Baidu and the moral credit went nowhere in particular, because in 2017 Google quietly started building a censored Chinese search app called Dragonfly, which its own engineers found out about from a leak and killed from the inside. Whatever principle was established on 22 March 2010 lasted about seven years, which is longer than most.

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