Google vs China: don’t be evil – or don’t be second?

Google has threatened to shut down its Chinese language search engine in response to hacking attempts and attacks on free speech by the Chinese government. In a blog entry entitled 'A new approach to China' posted yesterday, Google's senior vice president David Drummond revealed that last month the search giant had been the victim of hacking attempts originating from China. Although the Communist party is not directly blamed for the attacks, the implication is clearly there.

Drummond claims the primary aim was to gain access to the gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The hackers failed in that objective, managing to gain access only to limited information from two gmail accounts, but they did succeed in stealing intellectual property from the company.

Drummond also says that "at least 20 other large companies" from sectors including the internet, finance, technology, media and chemicals were targeted in the same way.

Independently of these hacking attacks, Drummond says, the gmail accounts of "dozens" of US, Europe and China-based human rights advocates were being routinely accessed using phishing scams and viruses.

Google launched google.cn, its Chinese-language search engine in January 2006, to howls of criticism from its fans who until then had held the company up as a shining example of good corporate governance for its unofficial - but widely publicised - motto: "Don't be evil".

At the time, Google justified its decision by saying its Chinese language service was being censored locally anyway - and it was offering a poor service as a result. In a blog entry posted at the time, the company said it hoped Google.cn "will make a meaningful - though imperfect - contribution to the overall expansion of access to information in China".

Google's retaliation - our word, not theirs - for the hacking attacks is to say they are "no longer willing to continue censoring" their results on google.cn. Drummond writes: "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." He says this may well mean shutting down Google.cn.

Google's expose comes a week after US software company Cybersitter named the Chinese government in a lawsuit claiming it had stolen thousands of lines of code from its parental internet filter to use in its Green Dam internet censorship programme. It raises the question of how long other big companies working in China, including Microsoft and Yahoo, can continue to turn a blind eye to China's state-sponsored hacking.

But quite apart from the Chinese government's restrictions, it has been suggested that any decision to end operations in China may be made easier by the relative failure of Google.cn compared to the company's runaway success elsewhere.

Baidu, the home-grown Chinese search engine still controls around 60 per cent of Chinese search queries, while Google is a distant second place with around 30 per cent. Is it possible that Google has changed its corporate mantra from 'Don't be evil' to 'Don't be second'?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Since this article was published, the Chinese government has responded, saying: "China welcomes international internet businesses developing services in China according to the law. Chinese law proscribes any form of hacking activity." ·