GOOGLE VERSUS CHINA: New round

While Yahoo! just follows the globalization, having provided the popular services to the users, Google actually promotes it. It wishes to "bring the freedom to every home" and is an ally to quite a number of specialized corporations, international and state structures with the certain technological and technical opportunities. "Freedom" at that, turns out to be a total control as long as the information doesn’t vanish but rather stays at Google servers, with the help of technology providing its very circulation.

So the epic battle "Google versus China" is still on. But why is it exactly "Google against China" but not the "China against Google"? Because it was Google who came into China, not vice versa.

A little bit of history for the start. Google was created in 1998 (as an Internet search engine first of all) and advanced in popularity quite soon. Even the verb "to google" meaning "to search for something in the Internet" appeared. However, in September of 2002 Chinese version of Google was blocked. In 2003 China launched the system of "Great Chinese firewall" that was officially dubbed the "Golden shield". Chinese authorities use it to limit and filter the access of its users to the Internet so for Chinese it became much more difficult to find pornography or the addresses of dissidents in the Internet. On the other hand, the very access to the "web" became much easier so today China is named to be the second rapidly developing and growing Internet-market in the world. It crossed the line of one hundred million users two years ago. Given such background, Google simply couldn’t sit on its hands.

In summer of 2004 company acquired the minority interest of Baidu — online-service, created by the Chinese graduated from Western universities. In the autumn of same year Google purchased the Chinese segment of YouTube for more than one and a half billion dollars and for the first time in the history it gave the grounds to suspect itself of the "self-censure", due to the requests of Chinese authorities. In February of 2006 during the American Congress hearings Google along with Yahoo!, Microsoft and Cisco have heard the unflattering epithets describing their activity as "aiding" the Chinese leadership to fight the "freedom of speech and the dissidents". Whether it was the circumstance that influenced Google or the logic of its own strategy but in 2006 it sold its Baidu share and launched Google. cn, i. e. the Google in Chinese, operating under the leadership of Chinese branch of the company.

Of course, certain agreements with the Chinese authorities were made. It seems so, at least. Google leadership preferred to put the blame for filtering its Chinese search requests onto the "Golden shield". However, by 2010 it became clear that they’d be unable to press Baidu at the Chinese field, while "innovative" Google also failed to make its way through the rest of the Chinese Internet-related fields, and previously unavailable segments of the informational space have miraculously started to open the access for the Chinese users.

PRC responded with the series of cyber-attacks then (at least, that was what the Google leadership was complaining about). However, Chinese authorities started to complain about Google’s behavior much earlier (to be precise, about their lack of political and moral censure) and during 2009 they undertook short-term blockings as the warning measure. This eventually ended with Google withdrawing itself from the continental China.

Still, not a single self-respecting transnational corporation may voluntarily reject from such a "titbit" as China. Recently Google addressed U. S. and European governments with the request to exert extra pressure on China and remove the Internet-censure. According to the opinion of Google representatives, this is the violation of the free trade rules and David Drammond (company’s lawyer) expressed the opinion that governmental negotiations may be the only means of influencing the situation. He specified in particular, that Beijing actions "place the transnational corporations into the unfavorable situation on the market" and Google has to redirect the search requests from its Chinese google. cn website to the google. com. hk portal (this is Hong-Kong by the way, where the Google servers were moved to) due to the fact that Chinese restrains the freedom of speech in the Internet. Particularly, company complained about the blocking of such web-sites as Facebook, YouTube, GoogleDocs and the Blogger.

The odd thing though, is that the rest of the "transnational companies" do not hurry to side Google nip and tuck in the single rank. Here’s Yahoo! for example. It is another popular Western Internet-giant and Google’s competitor. In June of 2007 company leadership has exerted soft critique of Chinese censure but as soon as in August — along with the Microsoft MSN — they signed the agreements with Chinese authorities, having stipulated their trustworthiness. In 2008, seemingly due to the Google’s initiative, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Cisco (provider of the network hardware) have voiced the need to impose a certain code of behavior in the countries with political limitations. It is unclear, whether this code ever appeared or not but it’s still only Google that manned the breach during the fight for the democratic values in China. What’s the matter then?

It seems that the matter is that Google leadership has its own global approach. Official version states that in 1998 two postgraduates of the information science department of Stanford University Larry Page and Sergey Brin started to go through channels offering everyone the prospective technology of the informational search and processing in the electronic networks. Having knocked around, they’ve decided that it’d be better to start up a business on their own and managed to "raise" million dollars from the "relatives, friends and acquaintances" and set up Google Inc. Proceeding from my personal experience I may assume that it could have been a certain representative of the venture capital who wormed its way into the abstract circles of "friends and relatives". 1990s were the years of the IT boom and the financiers were in the very thick of things, having paid for the works of competent professionals, engaged in the head-hunting for talents and the business-decisions. Thus, the presence of people, having such records as "Ernst&Young" or "McKinsey&Company" at theirs CV, in the Google leadership may tell us about the presence of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs or some other Citibank investors’ interests. That was exactly the kind of people that helped Andy Bechtolschteim — cofounder of today’s technology pacesetter Sun Microsystems, who once supported the Google architects. Google still has a warm relationship with that company. This is where the current Google CEO Eric Schmidt came from in 2001.

However, in a country where the government and big businesses are so intertwined such interests of the main Google decision-maker Sergey Brin as "search of information from the non-structured sources at the large text and scientific data bases", "research of the search systems", "extraction of models and connections from the Internet" and the "scalable ways of searching data in the regular structures", let alone the methods of calculating and analysis of market baskets may have been of interest not only to the financiers. While Google’s philosophy "Change the world for better" is just what the above-mentioned lads might need.

Here’s for example main manager of Google, its CEO Eric Schmidt. What else is he famous for, aside from his job title and the addresses against Chinese censure? Well, for being the New America Foundation board chair, that’s what. This "non-commercial" organization was formed in 1999 and it doesn’t make a show of itself, although it was formed by the friends of Henry Kissinger and features numerous influential observers from the leading American newspapers and, for example, Francis Fukuyama as its members. List of its sponsors, however, inspires some respect. It seems that there were certain grounds for the Western media to refer at its "data" while claiming the Iranian elections to be not legitimate.

So now such "absolutely non-politicized man" heads the company that knows everything about you thanks to your search requests, that has the ability to post the whole world cartography in the Internet thanks to the photos and satellite images with the resolution allowing to recognize the car plates, that has the opportunity to find a man with the help of video-cameras, mounted all over the world, company that urges to enter the market of mobile content and is interested in the alternative power supplies.

While Yahoo! just follows the globalization, having provided the popular services to the users, Google actually promotes it. It wishes to "bring the freedom to every home" and is an ally to quite a number of specialized corporations, international and state structures with the certain technological and technical opportunities. "Freedom" at that, turns out to be a total control as long as the information doesn’t vanish but rather stays at Google servers, with the help of technology providing its very circulation.

As we may see, Google as the champion of freedom in reality features the monopolistic manners. This makes it related with Bill Gates’ Microsoft, though the latter prefers to act via the large players — governments, economic conglomerates and so on. Their strong point is the ability to occupy the whole field and plant its poppy there. Google, at the same time, prefers to penetrate the markets thanks to its offers, truly exclusive by its nature, rather than imposed by the lack of alternative. That’s why Microsoft sticks to the tactic of "step-by-step advance" in China and plays according to the rules of transnational corporations, being partners to the Chinese authorities. Goldman Sachs, for example, issued the credit to Chinese alibaba. com created with the support of governmental programs for the e-commerce development. Today the company shows large returns to its investors, including the much-talked-about Yahoo! that is present at the Chinese market thanks to alibaba. com and the similar projects.

As the Baidu history showed us, Google is not suited with such model. When it became clear that Baidu is nothing but a filter-adaptor, adjusting the best products to the Chinese traditions and bringing it under the control of Chinese authorities (though, it doesn’t stop PriceWaterhouse from heading the Baidu supervisory board and Japan investor to be a part of the board) and the only thing Google can do is to collect the benefits, company leadership let everyone know that business for the sake of business is not what they really need.

In the meantime, there were certain changes in the political atmosphere. Internet-boom of the 90s took place during the rule of Democratic President Clinton, while the already formed assets, including Google, went to conquer the world during the time of Republican Bush. At the moment, however, the direction of the joint political and economic strikes was a bit different and the more-or-less smooth relationship with China was needed. That’s why until recently the only thing Google was able to do was to maneuver.

Today Obama is in power — he proclaimed the priority of the principal democratic values over the private interests and confirmed the right and role of the USA to protect and promote these very values all over the planet. Mind that Eric Schmidt is Obama’s aide who supervises the matters of the alternative power supplies among the other things.

As Sergey Brin put it: "Now we’re into the energetic field. If we succeed at creating cheap and pure energy this would make a huge business. We may have been lucky for now, but we’re making a good business at things that generally make the world a better place."

We can’t fail to note that the political conscience has awakened in Google right after Obama’s coming to power. We think though, that the matter here is not in the ideology itself but rather its economic underlying reason.

Google as well as several other transnational structures hardly lost a lot during the crisis. But what about Chinese leadership, for whom their own country and people make up the main asset, providing a decent place in the world? Maybe the Google leadership has the grounds to believe that the time when Chinese authorities may sacrifice part of their informational sovereignty has come?

By Ignat Kuskov