An update for our customers on Google Apps and China
Yesterday, we stopped censoring our search services - Google Search, Google News, and Google Images - on our Chinese domain, www.google.cn. This makes good on our commitment to stop censoring search results in China, and you can read more here.
Context & Ripple Effects
When Google agreed in 2006 to run a censored version of its engine inside China, the compromise drew immediate fire — coverage at the time catalogued exactly how much Google agreed to censor and used side-by-side screenshots to show what Chinese users were not seeing. That deal has now been unwound: as of March 24, 2010, Google Search, Google News, and Google Images on www.google.cn are serving uncensored results, which the company frames as making good on a public commitment.
The announcement runs on the Google Enterprise Blog rather than the main company channel, which signals who the message is really for: paying Google Apps customers who need to know whether their email and collaboration tools survive an uncensored search service. Sergey Brin sat down with the Wall Street Journal the same day to discuss what the story there calls a 'China Gamble' — an admission from the co-founder himself that keeping the pledge carries a real commercial cost.
First-order effects
- Users on www.google.cn immediately see uncensored Search, News, and Images results, exposing material that had been filtered under the 2006 arrangement.
- Google Apps customers receive direct reassurance from the Enterprise Blog that the search change is separate from their paid services — Google is managing churn risk among its enterprise base even as it accepts risk elsewhere.
Second-order effects
- Brin's own 'gamble' framing concedes the downside: the uncensored domain puts Google's legal standing to operate any .cn service in question, so every remaining piece of its China footprint — including the Apps business being reassured today — now sits behind the same regulatory risk.
- Other Western technology companies serving China face the same fork Google just chose on, since one major operator demonstrating that uncensored operation is publicly defensible raises the cost of staying silent.
Third-order effects
- If Google's wager holds, the 2006 'censored local domain' template for Western internet companies in China is dead, and the industry splits into firms that accept local filtering rules and firms that serve Chinese users from outside the firewall.
- If the wager fails and Google's licenses or access do not survive, the lesson for multinationals inverts — that unilateral stands against host-country censorship laws end in market exit, pushing the decision from individual CEOs toward board-level country-strategy reviews.
The trend: Global internet platforms are being forced out of the 2006-era compromise of running locally censored domains, choosing instead between full compliance with national censorship regimes and serving those markets on their own terms.