“Do No Evil,” says not a monk, an ima’am, or a priest. This is Google’s motto. Many of you may have heard of google’s stand-off with China after it discovered attempts by sophisticated Chinese hackers to gain access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The hackers were successful in their attempt, and google wasn’t happy especially after it compromised its corporate manifesto of free expression by agreeing to content filtration by the Chinese government of words such as Tibetan independence, the Dalai Lama, and the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Google has expressed its discontent with the Chinese attempts and vowed to scrap the content filtration and allow Chinese users of Google.cn to access whatever they want. It went further than that by stating that it would close its China offices. No country in the world can stand-up and slap the Chinese for their atrocious human-rights record among other things. However, a corporation did. Corporations are driven  by shareholders lust for returns, but not google. Their code says, “Do No Evil,” and they wouldn’t. No grey area for them and for that a lot of people salute and respect them.

The other side of the argument may claim that Google did this as a publicity stunt. According to Citibank research, Google derives only 1.5% of its total sales from China. Other research points that Google controls 30% of the Chinese search market while Beijing-based search rival Baidu has a commanding 60% market share. Seeing the failure of Yahoo! in gaining domination in China, Google got the message that they can never become the #1 search engine in China because the authorities simply wouldn’t allow it. They want a Chinese dominant player just like it is in every other sector and especially since the Internet one is of surveillance significance. In the light of such arguments, Google’s stock share price only went down 2% when the China news broke.

Nevertheless, China is a growing market and Internet users currently exceed those in the US. The Chinese Internet-user base is estimated to more than double in 3 years. This is definitely a lose of a growth venue for Google. Not only that, but also Google’s Android phone launch will miss-out on a critical market.

It remains to be seen what will happen as Google and China are currently in discussions. I believe China will not allow Google to humiliate it and will kick them out unless they adhere to the filtration system and perhaps even apologize. We will see how things unfold.

So what camp are you in? Is it a publicity stunt by Google? Or is it a true belief they take close to their heart? If you were a google shareholder, would you be mad or proud?

Tags: China, Do No Evil, Google

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 8:28 am and is filed under World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.