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Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 50 that all human rights can be relevant to all companies in this debate, even if they might be most interested in delving deeper on issues that relate specifically to their own industries. Also of interest is the role of the industry bodies such as the International Chamber of Commerce or the International Organization of Employers. These traditionally conservative bodies in December 2006 produced a report for John Ruggie, which noted that in weak governance zones, if the law is insufficient, companies should be making reference to international human rights standards. Another point worth questioning is the lobbying that goes on behind the scenes: What are governments saying to other governments and what should they be saying? And how transparent should they be? Within the Business Leaders' Initiative on Human Rights, there are two sponsors of the Olympic Games, Coca Cola and General Electric. What is their role? What is their responsibility? These are difficult questions. Despite a lot of good work so far on the relationship between business and human rights, there is still much to do. There are many companies that are not yet engaged in these issues. Nevertheless, over the last three years we have seen huge progress toward greater consciousness of the business-human rights relationship. A Chinese Puzzle: to Google or not to Google ? Robert O. Boorstin Director, Corporate & 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 for several months and then not to work anymore. 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.
Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 51 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 very difficult 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 wanted 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 selfcensorship 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 per cent 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,
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