Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom - World Press ...

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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we have had a statement at the bottom of the page, when you make a certain search,
which tells you that certain search sites or results have been eliminated because of
government regulations. We thought that was a very important thing to tell people. Was it
a perfect solution? No, but at least it was a partial solution.
A third responsibility we have is to protect our users' personally identifiable information
and their privacy. And that is why from the beginning we have not put information on
servers in China that could be linked to people directly. It is why we do not offer gmail or
blogger services in China, because if we were to do so we would end up with a situation
where the government could come to us and demand information and could shut us down
if we did not turn it over. We have chosen not to put ourselves in that situation.
A fourth responsibility is to challenge the government when we think that they are making
an unreasonable request or when it simply makes sense to do so to find out more about
what the regulations are. Some of the regulations are very hard to interpret, to
understand. And so we try to ask as often as we can how they will apply.
Finally, not only in China but also outside that country, we feel that have a responsibility
to press for human rights in as many forums as we can.
What challenges do we face in China? Well they are innumerable. We face a difficult
market, one that is hard to understand. We do not know with the government where we
stand from day to day. We face a huge number of regulations and licensing problems. You
would be surprised at the number of lawyers and the number of Google employees that
are involved in simply getting us to certain stages where we are able to offer services.
We face what I can only call a bias towards Chinese companies. This is one story that I
will tell. Back in October of 2007 there was I guess what you can call the perfect storm.
Within a couple of weeks the National People’s Congress happened, we opened a YouTube
Taiwan channel - that's always helpful in Beijing - and the Congress in the United States
awarded the Medal of Freedom to the Dalai Lama. All within two weeks. And we noticed
suddenly that all of Google's traffic, all of Yahoo's traffic and all of MSN traffic had been
redirected to Baidu (the Chinese search engine), and it remained that way for 18 hours. I
thought that was a fairly simple thing to interpret myself. But that is the kind of challenge
that we do face. When you typed in Google, you got Baidu. And that's quite an interesting
moment for any company to be dealing with.
Finally - and this is something I would say is not unique to Google but certainly we have
an unusual volume of it - we have a lot of internal questioning among our employees.
There was a great deal of controversy about our operations there and a great deal of
discussion still goes on within the company. We think that this is pretty healthy and it
keeps us on our toes. And we also think it is healthy because we said when we went in
with Google.cn that we would constantly review our operations, depending on how
conditions in China changed.
Let me end with the last question. What would you do? Put yourselves in the shoes of
somebody who is facing a situation, let's say in Thailand, where the government has shut