The Google Guys (15 page)

But sometimes Sergey feels the company has no choice but to remove material. Several years ago, for example, the Church of Scientology made a copyright claim against an anti-Scientology site that had excerpted text from the Church's writings. Sergey saw it as a free speech issue but had to back down because the anti-Scientology site did, removing the material rather than fighting .

When Google does remove search results, company policy requires that a notice be put on the site stating that information was removed. Google also publicizes what items were taken down by sending the information to an outside organization called Chilling Effects. Google forwards the complaints it gets, and Chilling Effects lists them on its Web site. Google often includes a notice on its search results page that there was a complaint and provides a link to
ChillingEffects.org
. Google is the only search engine that does this.

Nicole Wong, Google's deputy general counsel, is the point person digging up the facts on censorship and privacy issues. Wong is a short, smart bundle of energy; self-confident, enthusiastic, and enormously good at what she does. Wong, whom her colleagues have nicknamed “the Decider,” has considerable freedom to research and propose solutions to difficult issues such as censorship, having earned the trust of the founders. But she makes it clear that the standards she uses are set by Larry and Sergey—particularly Sergey—who attend most of the meetings where these issues are discussed. It's Wong's job to convince Larry and Sergey that her answers are the right ones. “The approach that our founders and Eric have believed in—and which I think is the right approach—is that when it comes to restrictions on speech, we should do so narrowly, in consideration of a wide range of factors.”

She notes that in the early years of the Internet, when Larry and Sergey developed their attitudes based on pure idealism, the main constituency was the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Australia, all countries with largely similar principles of freedom of speech. Google is now operating search engines in seventy languages. Censorship is not just a Chinese syndrome. China's censorship is just the most visible.

Wong clarifies the point. “We're now hitting a new generation of countries with both cultures and governments that are not on the same page in terms of freedom of speech,” she says. “We've seen large-scale [censorship] efforts in Turkey, in Brazil, in Korea, in India. That's been a challenge for all of us [including all the other search engines]. How do we operate in the world and do it responsibly? China is one of the longest-debated focal points, but I really believe we must keep our eye on the ball in every other country that has similar instincts—which is to shut it off, to block the site, to take down that URL.”

The German government, for example, demands that Google and any other Internet site operating in that country censor sites that publish or distribute Nazi material. Google blocks such sites from its German .de domain, but not at
Google.com
or other country domains. And the United States cuts short its free speech allowance when it comes to writings that promote violence, child pornography, and other illegal activity. Nobody complains about the fact that Google keeps its search engines from leading people in Germany or the United States to banned sites. The slope toward the abyss of censorship is almost impossible to avoid.

Censorship is a judgment call, involving not only government laws but cultural attitudes as well. Wong points out one dilemma that came up in 2007. Someone posted a video on YouTube that was highly critical of the king of Thailand, Bhumibol Adulyadej. The videos, which did not come from Thailand itself, were “unquestionably disrespectful,” says Wong, showing the king with a monkey face, for example, or posed in compromising positions. But were they illegal? In the United States, where political and other public figures are regularly parodied mercilessly, they would be allowed under the laws of free speech. Thailand is a different story.

Wong traveled to Thailand to research the issue personally. She discovered, first of all, that Thailand does have a law against insulting the king. The king, who is eighty-four years old and was crowned in 1950, is deeply loved as an important, stable, and respected figure in a country that has been characterized by many coups in the last two decades. “The reverence for the king across Thailand is absolutely uniform,” she says. “That law is a prime example of crystallizing the view of the people.” When she arrived in Thailand, for example, an American living there told her that, to the Thai people, the king “is a cross between George Washington, Jesus Christ, and Elvis Presley.”

Wong had arrived on a Monday, which happens to be the day of the week the king was born. Every Monday, the Thai people honor his royal color, yellow. When Wong walked out into the street, virtually everyone was wearing a yellow shirt with the king's image on it. “What that told me is, totally aside from what the law may be, the criticism of the king—which in the United States would be cast as political speech—had deep cultural significance in Thailand.”

In the end she decided it was right to block the offending videos in Thailand. “I don't dismiss the validity of having different norms about what's okay for me to say to you in Thailand, or what's okay for me to say to you elsewhere. It's just different. And it's upon us to figure out how we offer a global platform that gets that right.”

Wong firmly believes it was the right thing to do. “In offering our services, it's not just that all the information ought to be out there. It's also, are we respecting what people want to hear, what they're accepting of hearing? Or are we posting what essentially amounts to obscenity for them? I had to get to the country to figure it out, but I totally understand it at this point.”

But the point where she draws the line is when officials try to expand censorship across national boundaries. Turkish officials crossed it recently when they asked Google for a worldwide ban on YouTube videos that violate Turkish laws by insulting the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. At first Google responded to Turkish complaints by blocking the offensive videos only in Turkey. But in June 2008, Turkish officials demanded that Google block the videos worldwide, to protect the rights and sensitivities of Turks living abroad. Google refused, and Turkish censors blocked all of YouTube from being seen in their country.

To the top management at Google, these issues illustrate the complexities and subtleties of the issue of censorship. And they're still learning. “I consider us to still be in our infancy,” says Wong, “like we're going to take a corner too fast and hit our head on the wall. But this is an exciting time for us all to figure out how to get it right.”

The decision to go to China was the most difficult one they made, despite the conclusions of Wong, which they ultimately accepted. Censorship should be anathema to a company like Google, and China is perhaps the worst offender, targeting dissidents, reporters, and political foes as well as banning sensitive topics such as Tiananmen Square, Falun Gong, and Tibet. In one famous case, Chinese officials demanded that Yahoo turn over information about one of its customers, a reporter who had written articles critical of the government. Legally, Yahoo had no choice and turned over the information. He was then convicted and received a ten-year prison sentence.

The debate over what to do about China started in earnest in 2004 and continues to this day. “For well over a year the executives—Larr y and Sergey and Eric—debated what's the right thing to do. It was a very passionate discussion every time it came up,” says Wong, who participated in the debates with Larry and Sergey. To them, it was a decision with implications that would “affect the future of the Internet itself.”

In 2006, they finally launched a Chinese-based search engine,
Google.cn
, based and operated in China. The criticism throughout the Internet and the mainstream press was fast and furious.

Some of the criticism was off base. Many insisted that Google should just stick with its offshore Chinese search engine and try to get things past the censors as much as possible, rather than giving in to China's demands. Google still runs its offshore site, but since Google doesn't censor the results of that site, the Chinese government often blocks access to it using a filter known facetiously as the Great Firewall of China.

The founders finally decided that wasn't good enough. “A huge part of the discussion we had [internally] was whether we would have a chance to make a meaningful contribution [in China] by standing outside,” says Wong. “With the blockage of the [Google .com] service in China, it was not just that you're outside yelling, it's that you're outside yelling and nobody can hear you.”

Did Larry and Sergey succumb to the sheer desire to succeed in the fastest-growing and largest market in the world? It had to be part of the pressure they faced. China claims the world's largest population of Internet users—more than 253 million at the end of June 2008. Yahoo and Microsoft had already set up operations in China, and a Chinese search engine called Baidu was gaining traffic.

The market share of Google's offshore site started to falter in China as Baidu, which obeys the censorship laws, grew. In an August 2005 report, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) reported that Google's market share in China had dropped from its leading position to second place behind Baidu. Google's market share came in at 38 percent while Baidu's hit 44 percent.

At first, Google's response was to buy about a 3 percent stake in Baidu. But in January 2006 it announced it was opening its own operations in China, which meant agreeing to self-censor forbidden topics. (Google sold its Baidu shares several months after that announcement.) It turned out to be the decision that has done the most harm to Google's reputation. Across the Internet, bloggers denounced Google as having officially joined the ranks of “evil” corporations.

Once Google started operating on Chinese soil, it had to conform to Chinese laws, including censoring its own site, or face the consequences. Just after Google launched its Chinese operations, CEO Schmidt told me, “We have to obey Chinese law, or our employees there will be arrested and tortured. I have a problem with that.”

A big part of the rationale behind taking the cold plunge into China was the idea that operating on Chinese soil would benefit Chinese users. In order to set up an office in China, Google's executives had to agree to block certain sites and topics from its search results, based on a list provided by the Chinese government. But this also meant that the Chinese Firewall would no longer block access to Google's site, giving Google more control over its site and ensuring that it would run more efficiently.

Google's executives also had the hope, perhaps naively, that more competition would help open up the restrictive practices of that fast-developing country as it moved into taking a capitalist and more international stance. Just the presence of the Internet, even under restrictions, floods every country with more information than it has ever seen before.

Says Wong: “Anyone who believes in freedom of speech has to think this is the most exciting time we've ever been in. This is the biggest democratization of speech we've ever seen, which means that you or I or my five-year-old has essentially the same platform as ABC News, or the
New York Times
or
BusinessWeek
. And that's huge, and it's fraught with lots of problems. It's somewhat on the paradigm of that classic diplomatic question: isolate or engage? At the end of the day we decided to engage, because we believed that being there would have more possibilities of moving things in the right direction than refusing to be there.”

And perhaps Google's presence will make a difference. Unlike Google, Baidu does insert paid ads into the search results, which reportedly account for about 80 percent of the company's revenue. Press reports have recently alleged that those paid inserts include ads from illegal medical companies. And when the scandal over tainted milk erupted in 2008, Baidu became mired in another controversy, accused of accepting payments from the milk industry in return for censoring news about the scandal.

It is interesting, though, that moving into China has not helped Google's market share, which has continued to lose ground to Baidu. By late 2007, Baidu had grabbed a 62 percent share of Chinese searches, compared to Google's 24 percent.

The decision to move to China continues to nag at Sergey's conscience. At Google's 2006 annual meeting, shareholders representing human rights organizations began an annual protest, demanding that management reverse or reconsider their approach to China. Every year, the proposal is rejected. Larry and Sergey still own a third of the company's stock, with half the voting rights on board-level decisions.

At first, Sergey was defensive over China. At the 2006 shareholder meeting, the person raising the China issue argued that many people, he included, would switch to using other search engines in protest. Knowing that every other search engine already practiced what Google had just succumbed to, Sergey responded testily. “What search company would you switch to?” he shot back. The rights activist stammered over the unexpected question, then murmured that he personally used Yahoo. That was a mistake. Sergey was ready with his answer. “Oh, you mean the company that just turned over information about one of its users to the Chinese government and got him arrested?”

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2007, Larry and Sergey acknowledged that the negative publicity over the move had harmed the company's reputation. “On a business level, that decision to censor . . . was a net negative,” Sergey admitted. Larry has displayed a more pragmatic response, believing that they made the right decision, even if outsiders criticize it. “I don't think we as a company should be making decisions based on too much perception,” he said at the same meeting.