First, the motivator - Google needs to put servers on the ground in China, since the cost of international network connections is making it too expensive for people to search Google. Between bandwidth costs and the government's firewall blocking "subversive" queries, Google was severely handicapped:
Sergey Brin: Essentially the great firewall is sophisticated enough that it would block connections based on sensitive queries. The end result was that we weren't available to about 50 percent of the users. Universities can't afford the international bandwidth, so for example students at Tsinghua University -- and I saw this myself -- had to pay in order to use Google, and I mean pay a lot, even 25 cents a megabyte, which would be unaffordable even by American standards.This is nothing...there's no malicious plan there, it just legitimately is a bottleneck that bandwidth is somewhat limited.
Fortune: It's probably by policy also.
Brin: I don't know. I don't want to speculate. But anyhow the net effect is that all of our services...soon we will be largely unavailable.
You don't know? Isn't this something you should know? Is the Chinese government boosting the price of international bandwidth to control information flow?
Next comes the Great Rationalization -- China is better off with Google's presence even if they're not getting the whole picture. And since Google's only censoring a small amount, who's gonna notice a few missing results here and there? But isn't that missing slice much more important, byte-for-byte, than most of the rest of the stuff? After all, the material is censored because the government doesn't want its people to know the truth - and Google's raison d'etre is to be the unbiased source of the world's information.
We ultimately made a difficult decision, but we felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese Web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it.
In previous posts, dontbeevil was skeptical that Google would be allowed to show a disclaimer on search results pages that flag when results have been censored. Brin says they're already doing this in France and Germany when government-mandated Nazi materials are censored:
In France and Germany there are Nazi material laws. One thing we do, and which we are implementing in China as well, is that if there's any kind of material blocked by local regulations we put a message to that effect at the bottom of the search engine. "Local regulations prevent us from showing all the results." And we're doing that in China also, and that makes us transparent.
Just to try this out, I searched for [nazi] on google.de. Sure enough, there is a disclaimer at the bottom of the first page of search results. Google Translate says this means, "From arguments Google removed 1 result from this side. Further information about these arguments finds you under ChillingEffects.org." It doesn't exactly say that results have been censored, but this is a pretty transparent approach. It remains to be seen if this will be tolerated in China.
The disclaimer is OK as far as it goes. But I don't buy the argument that 98% of the information is good enough, or that Google's censored presence is a lesser evil than its free absence. Google is allowing themselves to be used as an instrument of oppression, and that's just not right.
And I also don't buy the argument that Chinese censorship of information on freedom, democracy, Tiananmen and human rights is morally equivalent to the United States' prohibition on child porn or Germany's restriction on Nazi materials. Neither the US nor Germany are using Google to restrict political thought.
Google has volunteered to join China's thought police. That's evil no matter how you rationalize it.