Google announced it is pulling out of the Chinese search market because it no longer wants to censor search results. Most in the West applaud this decision, but our view is that it is a bad and immature decision. I hope Google does not “censor” this dissenting voice by burying this article in its search results.
It started with hacking originated from IPs within China that “stole Google’s intellectual property”. Google is the tech leader in Internet. If the hackers were sophisticated enough to breach Google’s defense, wouldn’t they be sophisticated enough to spoof IPs or capture computers outside China so that it does not look like the hacking were from within China? If the security breach were the major reason of the decision, wouldn’t the right response be to shore up the defense, rather than pulling out of an important market? 0
If censoring search results were the main reason, why was Google okay with it in the past many years? What good will it do by pulling out of China? It is not going to help the free flow of information in China. Now there is not even a foreign competition in the Chinese search market. How would that help bring information to the Chinese people? Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. Isn’t China a big part of the world? Doesn’t this decision go against Google’s mission? 0
It would have been much more productive to stay in China and continue to stimulate the competition in the search market in China because that would help a lot more to the eventual free flow of information in China. Now Google just became an irrelevant bystander in search in China.