The ubiquitous web brand Google announced that it would pull out of the world’s most populous market this week if the censoring of its search results was not stopped. Spooked by “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on [its] corporate infrastructure” – Chinese e-assaults aimed at human rights activists – Google execs have threatened to cease google.cn operations if an agreement on filtering results cannot be reached.
This marks a volte-face for the new media conglomerate: it has hitherto ceded to Chinese demands that some politically and socially sensitive information be omitted from search results. Such were the conditions agreed to in 2006, when the California-based web outfit set up shop in the Chinese capital. This acquiescence spurned outrage among human rights activists, stakeholders and the public at large, who opined that Google’s cooperation with China drew into question the search engine’s ethics.
The website has seemingly seen the error in its ways: as one senior official has recently proclaimed, “it’s time the Chinese people had unfettered access to information.” Make no mistake about it: Google’s moral muscle-flexing comes by way of an ultimatum. “Over the next few weeks,” blogged the company’s chief legal officer David Drummon, “we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law”. If an accord cannot be reached, the communications colossus is prepared to leave the country.
Google doesn’t split any metaphysical hairs on the issue of its subjectivity and its moral machinations. It responded to the jeremiad in the same righteous rhetorical in 2006, insisting that despite its deference, the search engine’s presence would surely erode the Great E-Wall sundering the stalwart proto-Communist autocracy. “Although we weren’t wild about the restrictions, it was even worse to not try to serve those users at all,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said of the issue. “We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil,” he said, evoking company’s tongue-in-cheek “don’t be evil” credo.
It is unlikely, however, that Google’s gambit would have made a modicum of difference in Chinese Communist Party policy “given the fact that marketization is a state-orchestrated project and it is intended to strengthen rather than to undermine the legitimacy of the Party-state” notes Bingchun Meng, Lecturer and China expert in the Media and Communications department at the London School of Economics. The government’s take-no-prisoners track record suggests that anticipating any belt-loosening from Beijing would be a “gross underestimate of the power of this authoritarian regime.”
In turn, many posit that Google’s pullout is profit, rather than morally-motivated, notwithstanding the clarion calls of the conglomerate’s execs. This, coupled with the fact that business has lagged painfully behind the obeisant Beijing-based search engine Baidu, has added to the hue and cry by human rights activists and sympathizers.
That the entire issue has been so steeped in principle begets interesting questions of politics, ethics and international business. What of the mop-board premise of the multinational’s ‘moral responsibility’ in public discussion? And why would Google self-style as arbiter of free speech and expression in China? According to Meng, the concept of the ‘multinational as missionary’ comes within a “broader liberal democratic thinking that conflates market with freedom of choice, freedom of information … which are then directly linked to democracy”. Present day, ‘market’ has taken on the form of a ‘frictionless capitalism’, a post-industrial society in which we witness the end of labour, the primacy of software over hardware, and the annexing of the entire work week by the chinos and v-necks of Casual Friday. It is laden, at least on the surface, with the same liberal-democratic wisdoms that dominate straight-up political diplomacy – collaboration, creativity, dialogue and respect – and are similarly posited as the keys to success.
This business model has done little wrong by Google— except, of course, for in its pursuits on the Pacific Rim. But however futile and contentious are the ethical crusades of the ‘frictionless economy’ abroad, one can’t help but be heartened by its implications. What has been remarkable about Google’s treatment of the issue is the evident transparency and casualness of the conglomerate’s decision making. Google’s execs have preferred to grapple with their personal ethics in the company of reporters rather than rely on the sterile and guarded idiom of the press release. Voicing their doubts and bearing their necks, these web heavyweights have touted their humanity and potential folly, opening themselves up to criticism. Unsound business practice? Maybe. But I’d like to take it as propitious.
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