"At its best, Google is data-driven with an ethical trump card," said Larry Brilliant, who headed up the company's philanthropic efforts until 2009. Always it was the founders, Messrs. Brin and Page, who could play that card, he added.
Mr. Brin was born in Moscow in 1973. He emigrated to the United States with his family in 1979, he has said, in part because of anti-Semitism there before the fall of the Soviet Union. He has said in past interviews that the move and its circumstances had a profound impact on his life.
A Silicon Valley executive who knows Mr. Brin said his Soviet upbringing made him particularly opposed to state use of technology to spy on citizens. This person suspects that the apparent attempts to spy on Gmail users may have been as important in Google's reaction as the issue of censorship in China.
In China, cultural memes have required government officials to monitor their countrymen (and understand they will also be personally monitored by others in government) to insure that all government policies are followed to the letter of the law. At a recent news conference, Li Yizhong, Minister of Industry and Information Technology— the main regulator of China's Internet industry—was asked by a reporter how China would react if Google does stop censoring Google.cn.
"I hope Google can respect Chinese rules and regulations," responded Mr. Li. "If you insist on taking this action that violates Chinese laws, I repeat: You are unfriendly and irresponsible, and you yourself will have to bear the consequences."
Google's threat to stop censoring challenges the core premise of engagement with China for the last several decades: that the country is so big and its market so important that it must be accepted on its own terms. The showdown with China is one of the biggest challenges yet faced by Google, and is being watched by business broadly as a test of the compromises that companies must make in order to do business in China.
Not long ago, in the 1980s before communication transmission satellites and global CNN news coverage, governments in countries like Sweden, Finland, The Soviet Union and those in eastern Europe were able to control what their citizens heard and saw regarding national and world events. Today, information technology has spread individual freedom and knowledge throughout the world. Unfortuatedly, older Chinese government leaders continue to resist this new freedom of information trend by continuing to spy on their citizens and censor what they hear, see and experience.
In the U.S., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has increasingly made the issue of Internet freedom a cornerstone of the Obama administration's foreign policy agenda. In recent weeks, the State Department has announced it will begin serving as a quasi-venture capital firm, providing funding for companies involved in ensuring communication flows.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2010