by Steve Levy
At the time Brin tried to present the situation as just one more knotty consequence of tapping into the disruptive force that made Google Google. “As for China, I want to be respectful about all the kinds of issues they have, with the Falun Gong and so forth,” he said. “They also have their own set of laws. We didn’t have explicit communication [with the Chinese government] at that time. And we’ve tried to establish channels since then. But we felt that we should simply continue to provide the service we were providing, and eventually the site became unblocked. It just illustrates how Google is viewed as a really important tool for information.”
Left unspoken was Brin’s own history. His family had been victims of anti-Semitism under the Soviet regime. Sergey’s father, Michael Brin, had dreamed of being an astrophysicist, but the state had blocked his efforts. He became a mathematician, but though he graduated with honors from Moscow State University, his Jewish background made it impossible for him to continue his studies. (He would later sneak into research seminars and find advisers who helped him as he wrote a dissertation, for which he received a PhD.) He found work as an economist for Gosplan, the government planning agency. After a decade at the agency, he earned only a modest salary. Instead of using data to illuminate the reality behind statistics, Brin was forced to churn out misleading propaganda. “Much of that time I devoted to proving the Russian living standards were much, much higher than the American living standards,” Brin said to a reporter. Sergey’s mother, also a mathematician, worked as a civil engineer.
In 1977, Michael Brin attended a conference in Poland and for the first time socialized with Westerners, who gave him a sense of life outside the Soviet Union. It was possible, he realized, for his son to have a better future. “We cannot stay here anymore,” he said upon his return and with much trepidation began the risky process of applying for permission to emigrate. The family managed to leave Moscow in 1979, but not before a stressful waiting period. They spent several months in Paris waiting for visas before entering the United States, where Brin secured a teaching post at the University of Maryland.
The experience profoundly shaped Sergey Brin’s consciousness. “Just applying to leave the Soviet Union branded us with a scarlet letter,” he would later write in a blog posting. “My father lost his job, and we had visits from the police.” His personal saga left him with a visceral appreciation of the personal freedom provided by a democratic system—and the burden suffered by those whose freedom was constrained. Before Sergey entered college, Michael Brin led an exchange program of students back to the USSR, and Sergey accompanied the contingent. After two days of exposure to the soul-crushing landscape of his early childhood, he turned to his father, and said, “Thank you for taking us all out of Russia.”
Sergey shared with Larry a clear belief that data were the trump card in corporate decision making. But it troubled him when pure analytical criteria triumphed over vital humanistic concerns. In April 2004, Google had one of its countless minicrises, over an anti-Semitic website called Jew Watch. When someone typed “Jew” into Google’s search box, the first result was often a link to that hate site. Critics urged Google to exclude it in its search results. Brin publicly grappled with the dilemma. His view on what Google should do—maintain the sanctity of search—was rational, but a tremor in his voice betrayed how much he was troubled that his search engine was sending people to a cesspool of bigotry. “My reaction was to be really upset about it,” he admitted at the time. “It was certainly not something I want to see.” Then he launched into an analysis of why Google’s algorithms yielded that result, mainly because the signals triggered by the keyword “Jew” reflected the frequent use of that abbreviation as a pejorative. The algorithms had spoken, and Brin’s ideals, no matter how heartfelt, could not justify intervention. “I feel like I shouldn’t impose my beliefs on the world,” he said. “It’s a bad technology practice.”
What seemed to shake him most was the fear that people would believe that Google was somehow endorsing Jew Watch. “I don’t want people to be under the impression that these are decisions we somehow make,” he said. (Google’s eventual response to the problem was to serve its own sponsored link to the search term “Jew”—Google’s ad, titled “Offensive Search Results,” said, “We’re disturbed about these results as well” and offered a link to a fuller explanation of how Google’s algorithms could produce the occasional abomination.)
Google found itself in similar tough positions with Holocaust deniers and Scientology documents, which courts had ruled were protected as trade secrets. The company had to carefully abide by national laws while preserving its mission to make the world’s information accessible.
All of those controversies dealt with the delicate balancing act Google had set out for itself. Its business and its mission were pitched on the disruptive platform of the Internet; riding on the updraft of this tornado, Google was able to deliver the life-changing benefits of its search engine to users, but the company also paid the price of appearing to be the force behind the destruction of traditional models that the net leveled like so many trailer parks. Inevitably, Google drew critics, but guided by its motto, “Don’t be evil,” it managed its mission with a clear conscience. Until China.
2
“I choose Google. I choose China.”
While Google was growing in the 2000s, so was the People’s Republic of China. China was the most exciting business story of the decade. The once-isolated Red giant was not just transforming its economy but its people, who were rising from poverty to taste the fruits of capitalism. The Chinese government continues to squash political dissent, most notably in the technological barricade that prevents Chinese Internet users from accessing websites and services whose messages conflict with the government’s propaganda. (For instance, the government diligently blocks news accounts and web pages that refer to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. And if a Chinese user happens to look for a website referencing the dissident Falun Gong group, his or her Internet service might mysteriously go down for several hours.) Nonetheless, it became an article of faith in Silicon Valley—and some quarters of Washington, D.C.—that China’s adoption of the digital advances of the twenty-first century would inevitably erode those controls.
In any case, an internal company presentation at Google declared in January 2004, “China is strategically important to Google.” The country was too big to ignore. “Larry and Sergey were depressed by the idea that if we just stayed out of China, we would be giving up on a billion plus people,” says Andrew McLaughlin, who joined Google in 2004 as its policy director. McLaughlin had gained some previous experience in coping with China, helping out some nonprofit groups that wanted to make their information available in spite of China’s firewall. Not long after McLaughlin got to Google, the vice president of corporate development, David Drummond, took him aside and explained that Google had never really understood what had happened in the 2002 blockage and that it still had not established useful relations with the government. Google had sent an employee to Beijing, a Chinese-born Silicon Valley businessman named James Mi, to explore a more serious presence. He was essentially surveying the territory to see if it was plausible for Google to set up an engineering center there. Later that year Mi contacted McLaughlin and asked him for help.
In the spring of 2004 McLaughlin took a small Google delegation to China, the first of several journeys there he would undertake. “It was kind of a scouting trip,” he says. They met with government officials, of course—formal interviews in big, overstuffed chairs—but also with businesspeople, techie nerds, academics, and some people who had ambiguous connections to power and were quietly interested in the potential of a company like Google to help China make the transition to a more open and wired society. One of them was a woman named Hu Qiheng. Madame Hu’s father had been an associate of Chairman Mao, and her brother had been a top Communist official. She became a government expert on the Internet. She expressed excitement that Google’s entry
into the country would work out for the company and would be a positive force for China as well.
McLaughlin presented his findings at a GPS, laying out the benefits and risks—he was still skeptical about the perils of dealing with the government. Everyone agreed that Google should look into putting more energy into China. Schmidt asked McLaughlin to perform an ethical analysis. McLaughlin remembers his mission very clearly: “Forget about revenue, assume that business considerations play no role here whatsoever, and come up with the best analysis: ‘Will Google accelerate positive change and freedom of expression in China by being there, or will we accelerate it by staying out?’ That was the question.”
McLaughlin worked on his report for nearly a year, spending one week of every six in China. Sometimes he included Larry and Sergey in his interviews. At one point the three Googlers met with Qiang Xiao, a Chinese human rights activist who was teaching at Berkeley. He told Page and Brin that if he were advising almost any business—an auto company, for instance—he would tell them not to invest in China, as the business would just contribute to the oppression of its people. But the Internet was a different matter. People in China wanted to connect with one another, and the net would help them do that. Xiao told them that Google’s presence could help fight censorship by increasing communication.
But McLaughlin heard plenty of the other side as well. Censorship aside, Google would have to face the maddening process of dealing with bureaucrats. Kannan Pashupathy, for instance, had had experience with China while working for HP. “If you only wanted to start an engineering organization, you could do it rather easily,” he later said. “But if you wanted to actually start operating a business where you made money, you couldn’t do it without a certain type of license. It was a multiweek, multimonth time frame we could never depend on. Every month, it moved to the next month. We really couldn’t bank on that.”
In October 2004, Brin and Page were scheduled to go to Italy to receive the Marconi International Fellowship Award for computing innovation. At McLaughlin’s urging, they decided to continue traveling east to make a complete global circuit, visiting India and China. In India they met with the president, rode in rickshaws, and bantered with reporters (Sergey gabbed about his desire to see monkeys on the street). The Times of India wrote that in comparison to the serious demeanor of Bill Gates, Brin and Page “have been more like a couple of sophomore backpackers doing India.”
McLaughlin thought that approach would be a terrible error in China, making Google’s founders look like frivolous geeks who could easily be played by clever Communists. McLaughlin couldn’t get his bosses to listen to him, so he got Al Gore to speak to them. “I advised them to keep it low-key, because of the way Chinese react to Westerners, particularly Americans, who go over there and are full of themselves,” says Gore. Gore worried that the politically naïve Google founders might find themselves manipulated. He shared an experience he’d had as vice president, when he’d visited a Chinese factory. During the protocol negotiations, Gore’s representatives had made it clear that there would be no toasts—he would not clink glasses with Chinese officials. But at the actual event, a waiter with a tray full of champagne glasses made a beeline for Gore and handed him a glass. Gore quickly handed it off to an assistant, but a photo of that moment made it look like he was indeed raising a glass with the butchers of Tiananmen Square. He got ripped up for it in the press. Gore’s warning had its effect, and Page and Brin kept a low profile.
The trip was exciting—to a point. They visited all the major Internet companies—Baidu, Sohu, and Sina—to see what they were like. “We were treated warily,” says McLaughlin. “They couldn’t tell if we were a friend or a foe.” Despite the fact that Google was about to make an investment in China’s leading search engine, Baidu (a $5 million toe in the water), CEO Robin Li held the meeting on a national holiday so that Brin and Page could not see how many engineers he employed. The Google cofounders offended Li by refusing to eat the Subway sandwiches that Baidu provided.
The trip awakened the founders to how fast things were moving there and gave them a glimpse of the impact Google might have if it went all in. “They definitely were interested,” recalls McLaughlin. “But Sergey’s background as a refugee of the Soviet Union made him inherently suspicious of doing business in an environment like that.” The bigger question remained: should Google begin the process of cooperating with the Chinese government to get a license to operate in China?
The advantage was clear: Google could offer a speedier, more satisfying experience than existing search engines offered. Page and Brin were startled and upset by the difficulty people in China had getting access to the Internet in general and Google in particular. But in order to get a license to operate, Google would have to follow the Chinese government’s restrictions. Which meant that Google, which had always strived for purity in its search results, would have to alter its very nature in order to hew to the government’s Orwellian demands.
McLaughlin thought that Google should stay out, and his formal report made that clear. He acknowledged that Google’s presence might benefit China. His concern was with what the experience would do to Google. “My basic argument involved the day-to-day moral degradation, just dealing with bad people who are badly motivated and force you into a position of cooperation,” he says. “It’s degrading to the company. Life is short, focus on other markets. Don’t go into countries that are going to force you to censor to do business there, even if you could do good by being there.”
The entire executive team participated in the debate, though the call would be made by Google’s reigning troika. Schmidt was all for entering. Brin was troubled at the prospect. But Page, a natural optimist when it came to the potential of technology to transform society, believed that Google’s entry would be a boon to China.
Because the good that Google would do was hard to predict and impossible to measure, the China decision would be determined not by data but by gut. Nonetheless, the Google executives came to a decision using a form of moral metrics. The evil of censorship was balanced with a number of other factors, many of them involving the benefits that would come from Google’s participation in China. It was as if Google had created a kind of spreadsheet, with some cells (censorship) showing a loss and others, relating to more information, increased use of the Internet, and Google’s determination to eventually decrease censorship, winding up on the profit side. The global calculation of this virtual spreadsheet indicated that, morally, Google would wind up in the black. As Schmidt later explained, “We actually did an ‘evil scale’ and decided not to serve at all was worse evil.” All three leaders signed off on the concept.
To what degree did business considerations affect the outcome? You would have needed a psychologist, or a polygraph, to figure out whether the rush to China was fueled by self-interest. But even years later, Larry Page would insist that the evidence indicated that the right thing—the moral thing—was to help the people of China by giving them access to Google. “Nobody actually believes this, but we very strongly made these decisions on what we thought were the best interests of humanity and the Chinese people,” says Page.
In some respects, setting up Google China was a similar process to the one Google had used in Zurich, Tel Aviv, and Bangalore. There would be a business operation that handled the local marketplace and took care of marketing and ads, and an engineering center where Googlers would create products for both the specific region and the world at large. It would be housed in a Googley office, with accommodations to the national culture. But some aspects of the China operations were unique. No other Google center had to deal with anything like China’s strict licensing requirements. No other Google country had such disregard for civil liberties that building a local data center (vulnerable to government seizure of information) was out of the question. And no other country required Google to censor its results for a broad range of content, especially content that contained a mere whiff of dissent.
; If Google’s Chinese service, running on the .cn Chinese Internet domain, was to earn its license, it would have to follow those laws. But Google had some ideas on mitigating the abhorrent practice of censorship. In an October 2004 presentation, “China Entry Plan,” the company proposed that it explicitly inform users when results were blocked. A December 23 “China Launch Update” elaborated that Chinese users should be given “the greatest amount of information possible.” When a search query listed a result that required filtering, Google would indicate at the bottom of the results page that there were results missing. Meanwhile the company would continue offering its Chinese-language version of the global search engine (which appeared when someone inside the country typed “www.google.com”), though it knew that the Chinese government would often block it and Google could not get a license to make money from it.
A different problem was determining what information should not be given to Chinese users. Though the government demanded censorship, it didn’t hand out a complete list of what wasn’t allowed. Following the law required self-censorship, with the implicit risk that if a company failed to block information that the Chinese government didn’t want its citizens to see, it could lose its license. That was actually an interesting problem, and if nothing else, Googlers loved to solve such brain-twisters. In this case, they came up with an elegant solution. Google would exhaustively examine and probe the sites of competitors, such as China’s top search engine, Baidu, testing them with risky keywords, and see what they blocked. It was a speedy means of determining forbidden information, and best of all, it scaled. Just as the people who created Google’s machine learning algorithms didn’t have to know Urdu or Greek to be able to write software that could be translated into those languages, Google’s .cn programmers would not have to deal in the unpleasant intricacies of denying freedom to customers. The algorithms could do the censoring. In practice, the Google divination of what terms must be censored was only a baseline and was augmented by regular calls from the government demanding that Google block links to various other sites or not provide any links involving certain events or themes.