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Google: going for the big money

This came a big suprise for me: Google has said it will censor its search services in China in order to gain greater access to China’s fast-growing market. It seems that the company that prides itself in its motto “don’t be evil”, is giving in to the big money. The Chinese Google site wil be available under http://www.google.cn and will be censored. Google’s decision on China comes less than a week after it resisted efforts by the US Department of Justice to make it disclose data on what people were searching for. According to a Reuters news release Google even admits their move is in violation of it’s company motto. But as to be expected they have already come up with a weak excuse: “While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission.”

Google officials said they planned to notify users of its Google.cn service when the company has restricted access to certain search terms or the Web sites behind them.

China is known as the most repressive censorship regime on the Internet. Obviously the balance for Google between the freedom of information it champions and the censorship demanded by Beijing, is tilting towards China’s 111 million Internet users – or plainly said: market share. And thats a bad thing – in my humble opinion.

As the BBC reports:

Julian Pain, internet spokesman for campaign group Reporters Without Borders, said Google’s decision to “collaborate” with the Chinese government was “a real shame”.
Google is not the only high-tech company accused of carrying out Beijing’s dirty work. Last year Yahoo was accused of supplying data to China that was used as evidence to jail a Chinese journalist for 10 years.

So what is the deal here? Besides going for the big bucks, there is also a chance that Google is thinking they will change the system from the inside? Afterall: you can’t stop progress (in this case: democracy). Then again: maybe that’s to much of a ‘conspiracy theory’ scenario.