Google may have lost its domestic footing in China but it leaves with its reputation largely intact

WHEN GOOGLE announced it was henceforth refusing to censor its Chinese Google.cn site, and would be reviewing its involvement in the Chinese market entirely, it didn’t take long for a cynical explanation to emerge from the internet.

It’s quitting China, said the doubters, because it’s losing market share to local companies like Baidu. This is its way of saving face.

I’m a regular critic of Google and in particular of its decision to censor its Google.cn service. But I don’t think this decision was made to cover up an ignoble failure in China. Google has been struggling in China, it’s true, but much of that struggle has come from its determination to stay true to its cultural values even when it involves clashing with the Chinese authorities.

Google has censored but, unlike local sites, it has been honest with its Chinese users and told them when links have been removed. While it moved its search engine to China to prevent it being blocked, Google has consistently refused to move its Blogger and Gmail services on to the mainland, it seems, for fear of them being censored and compromised by Chinese law enforcement.

In return, Google has been regularly pilloried by the state-controlled press and made a target of China’s frequent campaigns against “obscenity” online. Now, it seems, Google has had enough.

I believe Google’s own explanation for why it has very publicly returned to an uncensored Chinese search engine feed. The company did so in response to hacking attacks on human rights activists using its Gmail service, and Chinese attempts to break into its own corporate source code systems.

Google hasn’t explicitly linked these attacks to the involvement of the Chinese security services but the accusation hangs in the structure of its announcement. The company clearly believes the espionage comes from very close to China’s own state actors.

Hillary Clinton has already demanded an explanation from Beijing, and I’m sure there will be more political ramifications to follow.

In a word: Google has had enough of China’s flouting of its own law and has decided to no longer participate in the game of deference and denial that China expects foreign companies to play on its soil. It has taken its ball and gone home.

Even though Google has only a small percentage of China’s search engine market, that’s still a vast number in China’s huge and growing market. Its loyal Chinese users left flowers at Google’s local offices, and some have already started a www.googlebacktochina.com campaign.

It’s very unlikely, given the search engine’s public defiance of the authorities, that Google will return. Its staff in Shanghai and Beijing are preparing to find work elsewhere.

Google may have lost its domestic footing in China, but it leaves with its reputation largely intact. In particular, its targeted outrage at the attacks on Gmail and its infrastructure will reassure users of its services that their own private information will not be handed over lightly.

And by calling out the Chinese government one final time, Google has already ensured that politicians and western cybersecurity czars will have to go public with their own criticism of China’s underhand tactics against companies and individuals.

And while Google may have to leave China, that doesn’t mean it needs to leave the Chinese. The Great Firewall of China will no doubt continue to deny locals access to Google’s foreign servers. But now that Google has made a decision, we may well see its undoubted networking smarts begin to turn in another direction. Instead of working to censor its feed and comply with the arbitrary demands of an authoritarian regime, Google may begin to work on the thorny problem of how to render the Great Firewall ineffective.

Perhaps it’s hubristic for Google to believe it can take on China’s autocratic approach to the internet and win but I’d wager it’s China that’s now swimming against the tide and Google that’s returning to its real expertise.

On the day the company made its announcement about China, it made a much quieter technical statement about Gmail. Users of Google’s e-mail service will now, by default, have encryption turned on. That means China can no longer snoop on traffic going between Google’s servers and its citizens’ computers.

What else could Google do to protect Chinese users’ privacy and right to access the internet? Pour resources into providing the infrastructure to circumvent the firewall? A version of Google’s Chrome browser that lets Chinese users seamlessly see the real internet? Android phones which provide real security even against China’s own government spooks? Use its growing Washington lobbying skills to put real political pressure on China to comply with international standards on human rights, unblock the internet, and stop using malware and cyber attacks to pursue its political objectives?

If that’s what Google intends to do now it would be a far better result for the internet – and China – than all its years of trying to play along with the People’s Republic.

Google was an awkward and compromised corporate player within the current culture of Chinese business. Now that it has the luxury of no longer caring, it might have a chance to pursue some of the old-style disruptive innovation that made it the company that could afford to walk away.