The Google.cn Decision Is Not About IP

Journey To The West

Drewbot on Google & China

The excuse given for their previous censorship efforts was that Google plans to adhere to ‘local laws.’ This sidestepped the issue and ignored the big question: do these local laws harm or impede people or their rights.

Only now, when their own intellectual property is threatened, do they act. The fact that Google actively champions itself as the leader of an “Open Source” movement makes this story all the more ironic.

I don’t believe for a second that this really, truly has to do with IP. My own experience with Google as an organization is that it strives to practice its mantra of “Don’t Be Evil”, and as compliance with states like China has shown, sometimes not being evil is tricky indeed.

Google didn’t have to do this. They didn’t have to walk away from many millions of impressionable (pun intended) Chinese people. But they did. And that’s why this is indeed a huge story, with extraordinary possible ramifications of historical scale. The original post used the phrase “we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities”. I wouldn’t be surprised if these authorities consulted went as high up in the authority chain as the Secretary of State.

I’m not knowledgeable enough about this subject to speak at length without turning into a talking asshole, but I do have one point that I believe should be raised.

Was this brute force attack carried out by the Chinese government? I’m sure there’s a good chance it was. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was done by savvy dissidents engaging in the Art of War. Perhaps even Google itself, providing itself with an excuse for shareholders and a better position for future negotiations with the Chinese government.

Outside of such groundless speculation, I am resigned to watch this develop, and I’ll be excited to see where it goes from here. Hopefully in a progressive direction, because as Drewbot wrote in his post, “the only losers in this debacle are the Chinese people.”

At the very least, this incident gives us a better subject of collective sympathy than Conan O’Brien.

Update: My speculation was indeed groundless. The Hacker News discussion has come up with a lot of great links and facts about what appears to a be a massive coordinated attack on “the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical”.