The Green Karnyval: Is Google holding true to their corporate ethical values?

How Google may open up the doors of Access to Information in China. An Article examining social responsibility and corporate ethics. View the larger presentation at Prezi.com

Contents:

Google’s Philosophy

· Ten Things Google Knows to be True

· Privacy Principals

· User Experience

· Security Philosophy

Google History Facts

· From 2006 to the Present

What others have to say about Google and China

· Lisa Roner – EthicalCorp.com

· Siva Vaidhnyanathan – author of “The Googlization of Everything”

Environment and Precedent

· Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethic

· The Atlantic Monthly

My Conclusion Based on the Evidence

Index of References Used

Additional Videos and Resources on the topic

Digital Inspiration

How China Censors the Internet – Video

http://www.labnol.org/internet/how-china-censors-internet-sites/8603/

All blog posts from The Official Google Blog with the label Asia

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Asia

A new approach to China 1/12/2010 03:00:00 PM

Testimony: The Internet in China 2/15/2006 09:50:00 AM

According to Google’s Corporate Overview

Google’s Philosophy

Ten things we know to be true

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.

2. It's best to do one thing really, really well.

3. Fast is better than slow.

4. Democracy on the web works.

5. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer.

6. You can make money without doing evil.

7. There's always more information out there.

8. The need for information crosses all borders.

9. You can be serious without a suit.

10. Great just isn't good enough.

Privacy Principles

1. Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.

2. Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.

3. Make the collection of personal information transparent.

4. Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.

5. Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

Google User Experience

1. Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams.

2. Every millisecond counts.

3. Simplicity is powerful.

4. Engage beginners and attract experts.

5. Dare to innovate.

6. Design for the world.

7. Plan for today's and tomorrow's business.

8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.

9. Be worthy of people's trust.

10. Add a human touch.

Google's Security Philosophy

· We've learned that when security is done right, it's done as a community

Google History Facts

When Google first made the decision to market its search engine to internet users in China, the idea was to have a Chinese version of the Google search engine. This would include translating all of the Google search engine components into Chinese, but not limiting any information to the average Chinese internet user. (Morrill and Keen)

When the Chinese version of Google was shut down by the Chinese government, Google decided to take a different path. In December of 2005, Google signed a deal with the Chinese government that enabled the company to establish a legal presence in China. (Morrill and Keen)

Google decided to mimic the firewall of China. Google achieved this by setting up a computer inside China and programmed it to try to access websites outside the country that were controversial. If a site was blocked by the firewall that meant that the Chinese government regarded the content as controversial and Google added it to its backlist of banned websites” (Morrill and Keen)

After finding what sites to block, Google launched its newest creation, Google China on January 27, 2006. Google China gives the average Chinese internet user the ability to search for information without being slowed down by the Chinese firewall. (Morrill and Keen)

Google differentiated this product from those of its competitors by: (1) keeping personal information outside China through Gmail, its Web-based email service, and Blogger, its personal Web-blog-hosting service; (2) disclosing the presence of general filtering to users; and (3) continuing a Chinese-language version of Google.com. (Martin)

the Google China website does not just display a message such as “page not available,” but instead displays a message that explains to the Chinese internet user that the “Information is not available due to Chinese law. (Morrill and Keen)

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. 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. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. (Official Google Blog)

The surprise move was accompanied by a signal from Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of State, that she was preparing to throw her weight behind a campaign against China's lack of free speech. The State department said that Mrs. Clinton had met with executives from Google and Microsoft, as well as with Cisco Systems, which provides much of China's internet infrastructure, to discuss how to stop countries from "stifling" access to information. Next week the US is to launch a new technology policy to help citizens in other countries to gain access to an uncensored internet. (Moore and Foster)

What others have to say about Google and China

Now there are many conflicting views about Google surrounding it’s ethics and motives and even conflicting actions taken by Google. A week prior to Google Entering China:

Last summer when the US Department of Justice, in what it said was an effort to uphold an online pornography law, asked Microsoft, Yahoo and America Online to turn over records of millions of their users’ online searches, the companies complied.
But Google dug in its heels and made it clear it had no intention of compromising its corporate ideals or its users’ privacy. Even after a federal judge ordered in January to surrender the records, in no uncertain terms Google told its own government to take a hike.
Less than a week later, though, Google announced it was launching a censored version of its search engine in China. (Roner 2006 www.EthicalCorp.com)

The key here is that Google is threatening to pull Google.cn out of reach of the millions of elite, cosmopolitan users within the People's Republic. Most Chinese Web users use Baidu. But Google is the choice of those who travel, do business overseas, or are expats from the United States or Europe. Those people have some pull with the Chinese government. And they will want their Google.cn. (Siva - Siva Vaidhnyanathan- 2010)

Environment and Precedents

Kristen E Martin - Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics
Case BRI-1005Google China inc. (condensed)

James Keith, senior adviser for China and Mongolia in the State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, testified before Congress:

“China’s well-documented abuses of human rights are in violation of internationally recognized norms, stemming both from the authorities’ intolerance of dissent and the inadequacy of legal safeguards for basic freedoms. Reported abuses have included arbitrary and lengthy incommunicado detention, forced confessions, torture, and mistreatment of prisoners as well as severe restrictions on freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, religion, privacy, worker rights, and coercive birth limitation. In 2005, China stepped up monitoring, harassment, intimidation, and arrest of journalists, Internet writers, defense lawyers, religious activists, and political dissidents.6”

Enforcement

Enforcement involves the use of both governmental censorship and self-censorship. It is known to be present in the following:

• Technology: Positioning routers at the edge of the domestic Internet

• Government law enforcement: 30,000 Internet police

• Corporations: Self-censorship of cybercafés

• Propaganda: News stories about imprisoned journalists

• Individuals: Online reporting centers encouraged “citizens to report ‘harmful’ information

• Vague yet specific approaches: Seemingly omniscient presence; definition of “harmful material” changed weekly

Backlash

To circumvent the Chinese surveillance program, tech-savvy Chinese citizens relied upon proxy servers and anonymizer programs, often located outside China. News of these technologies traveled the old-fashioned way—by word of mouth, radio, or underground newspaper. This antisurveillance movement also used the Internet to communicate important news that had been censored by other Chinese media outlets, including newspapers, radio, and television. For example, news of an AIDS epidemic in Henan Province, safety conditions in mines, poisoning of the Songhua River, and the SARS outbreak all reached a wider audience through the use of the Internet and the circumvention of Chinese filters. (Kristen E Martin Case BRI-1005)

Ben W. Heineman, Jr. - The Atlantic Monthly Jan 13 2010, 1:30PM

Two limiting cases are Nazi Germany in the 1930s and apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.

Although the history is extremely complicated, many American multi-national companies--IBM, Kodak, GE, DuPont GM, Ford--had either wholly-owned or partially owned subsidiaries operating in Germany from Hitler's take-over in 1933 to the outbreak of war in 1939. As a general matter, they continued to operate despite the impact of increasing discrimination in law and enforcement against religious groups, ethnic groups and other minorities. One plausible explanation: inaction resulted from their profitability and own weak ethical standards combined with either unawareness or indifference in pre-war America to Hitler's rising power and inhumane practices.

By contrast, many American companies in South Africa during the 1980s were publicly opposed to apartheid due, in important part, to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s in the U.S. and the broadly shared view among many corporate stakeholders that state-sanctioned racial separation and discrimination was morally wrong and commercially intolerable.(Heinman)

(After the U.S. and European governments enacted tough economic sanctions, many international companies stopped doing most business in South Africa--an important factor in apartheid's demise.)

My Conclusion Based on the Evidence

My own conclusion is this: that based on the above information, in order for Google to change China or to open doors in China they first needed to be invited in. Once they were invited in they did the responsible thing of keeping private data out of the realm of Chinese jurisdiction. Now China violated that relationship by attacking Google out of their jurisdiction so now Google has an opportunity, they can play the China game like so many companies do and so many governments, or they can take a stand and exercise their values.

It is my hopes that they hold true to their values and it is my hopes that the Chinese government will look at its attack on Google for what it is and realize the potential loss that may ensue if it does not repair the relationship between Google and China. Two things to consider are 1). it is beneficial to realize the potential of the long term relationship between Google and China and 2). Google is going nowhere and so whether the Chinese government is playing nice or not it has to play in the same playground.

Index of References Used

· Andrew Keen
The Weekly Standard - May 3, 2006
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/176wtlbv.asp

· Carson Morrill
“Ethics in question: Is Google’s censoring of anti-Chinese information on its Chinese search engine ethical?”
http://www.lagrange.edu/resources/pdf/citations/2007/business/Business%20-%20Carson%20Morrill.pdf

· Kristen E Martin
Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics - Case BRI-1005 Google China, Inc. (condensed)http://www.darden.virginia.edu/corporate-ethics/pdf/Case_BRI-1005_Google_in_China_condensed.pdf

· The Official Google Blog
A new approach to China 1/12/2010 03:00:00 PM
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

· Telegraph.co.uk
Google Threatens to Pull Out of China
by Malcolm Moore in Shanghai and Peter Foster in Beijing Published: 7:00AM GMT 13 Jan 201
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/6978537/Google-threatens-to-pull-out-of-China.html

· Lisa Roner
Internet Ethics – Googling for balance in China - 11 March 2006
North American Editor for EthicalCorp.com
http://www.ethicalcorp.com/content.asp?ContentID=4136