A top Google lawyer told Congress Tuesday that the company still has no idea when or if it will make good on its public ultimatum in January to pull out of China unless it is allowed to stop censoring search results.
"We are still weighing our options," Google Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong told the Senate Judiciary committee in a hearing on internet freedom.
Google made its stunning promise seven weeks ago, when it publicly disclosed that its Gmail service had been attacked by hackers targeting Chinese human rights activists. That attack, which targeted some other 20 tech companies including Adobe, Yahoo and Intel, also sought source code, and resulted in Google losing some intellectual property.
That was enough to make the search company to radically rethink its 2006 deal with China, which allowed the creation of Google.cn. Under the controversial bargain, Google agreed to censor search results upon request from authorities but would tell users at the bottom of censored pages that results were withheld at the request of the Chinese government. At the time, Google thought that its deal would eventually lead to more internet freedom in China, but that's not how things have worked out, according to Google.
"We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all," the company said. "We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China."
The statement left little room for either Google or China to negotiate and save face.
In the intervening seven weeks, Google has remained mum on how or whether it plans to stick to its word, as China has moved to further tighten its control over online speech in recent weeks. Google is willing, according to one insider, to trade off stricter limits on sexually explicit and gambling-related search results for complete freedom for political topics, but it's unlikely that China will agree to such a bargain.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin was reportedly the driving force behind the decision to publicly repudiate its Chinese censorship, but in recent public appearances, he's declined to say when or if Google will shutter its Google.cn website. Chinese users would then have to try to use Google.com through China's firewalls, or use more popular Chinese-run search engines such as Baidu.com, which embraces the government's censorship rules and uses them to its commercial advantage.
Photo Illustration: Felipe Siem
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