by Steve Levy
Plans for Google.cn were well under way by May 7, 2005, when an unexpected email arrived in the inbox of Eric Schmidt. It was from a computer scientist and executive named Kai-Fu Lee. “I have heard that Google is starting an effort in China,” he wrote. “I thought I’d let you know that if Google has great ambitions for China, I would be interested in having a discussion with you.”
Lee mentioned that he was a corporate vice president at Microsoft who had started its research and R&D efforts in China, and thoughtfully provided a link to an article in Technology Review that described Microsoft’s Beijing center as “the World’s Hottest Computer Lab.” The biographical information was unnecessary. Kai-Fu Lee was a celebrated computer scientist—he’d worked for Apple before Microsoft—who had become a phenomenon in China. Lee, who had grown up in Taiwan and gotten his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon, was the embodiment of the “sea turtle”—an Asian-born engineer whose success in America was a prelude to a homecoming that allowed him to contribute to China’s drive to the pinnacle of the world economy. Lee was perhaps the most famed of all sea turtles. Hundreds of thousands of people went to his website and wrote to him for advice, as if he were a combination of Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Abigail Van Buren.
Google immediately recognized how Kai-Fu Lee could accelerate its plans to make a mark in China. “I all but insist that we pull out all the stops and pursue him like wolves,” Senior Vice President Jonathan Rosenberg wrote to his fellow executives. “He is an all-star and will contribute in ways that go substantially beyond China.” Alan Eustace responded to Lee’s email, urging him to “call me as soon as possible, 24 hours a day, on my cell phone.” Lee flew down to Mountain View to meet with Google executives on May 27, 2005. The session was a love fest. That didn’t stop Google from conducting a series of job interviews. “How would you write a short program to tell if an image was a banana or an apple?” one engineer asked him. But these were really formalities. When he met Brin and Page—Lee was startled when Sergey, who had arrived by skateboard, asked him, “Do you mind if I stretch?” and then asked questions while doing body motions on the floor—Lee overheard them as they left the room. “People like KaiFu don’t grow on trees,” one founder said to the other. When Lee returned to Seattle, he was greeted by a huge box of Google swag, including a basketball, a chair, and a coin-operated gumball machine with a Google logo. When Google’s offer came a couple of weeks later, he decided to accept.
Lee resigned from Microsoft on July 18 and officially accepted Google’s offer the next day. It was worth over $13 million, including a $2.5 million signing bonus. Lee posted an explanation on his Chinese-language website, with the headline “I need to follow my heart.” He said that Google had given him “a shock” by its fresh approach to technology and postulated that in China, his new employer’s youth, freedom, transparency, and honesty would produce a miracle. “I have the right to make my choice,” he wrote. “I choose Google. I choose China.”
Microsoft rushed to the courthouse and charged Lee with violating a noncompete agreement that was part of his employment contract. The Washington state judge filed a temporary restraining order preventing Lee from joining Google or even talking to its employees. “I had one meeting with him to transition my China duties to him,” says Pashupathy. “I said, ‘Kai-Fu, welcome to Google. Here’s all I know about China.’ And the next day I couldn’t talk to him.”
By going to Google, Kai-Fu Lee had hit a soft spot in Microsoft’s psyche. Ironically, in early 2002, Kai-Fu Lee, who was an early enthusiast of Google search, had once recommended to Bill Gates that Microsoft buy Google. After looking into it, Gates told Lee that the cost would be too high. “It’s a company without revenue but asking for a billion dollars,” he said to Lee. “Those two kids are crazy!” After it became clear that Google was not just an innovator but a financial powerhouse with resources to take on Microsoft, the rivalry took on a bloodlust. Just how intensely Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, despised his competitor to the south became clear in depositions that would be filed in the Lee lawsuit. The year before, in November 2004, a top Microsoft executive named Mark Lucovsky had gone to Steve Ballmer with the unwelcome news that he was leaving Microsoft. “Just tell me it’s not Google,” said Ballmer, according to Lucovsky’s sworn testimony. Lucovsky confirmed that it was indeed Google. Lucovsky testified that Ballmer went ballistic: “Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy! I’m going to fucking bury that guy! I have done it before and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google.” (The reference to having “done it before” seemed to refer to Microsoft’s anticompetitive actions during the browser war, when Schmidt was aligned with the Netscape forces.) For good measure, Ballmer threw a chair across the room, according to Lucovsky. (Ballmer would later say that Lucovsky’s account was exaggerated, but the CEO’s denials were not made under oath.)
A little-noticed aspect of the litigation was a declaration made by Kai-Fu Lee. He claimed that Microsoft didn’t understand how to deal with the Chinese and that its employees “repeatedly angered and embarrassed various officials in the Chinese government.” He told of an episode when Bill Gates had yelled at him that the Chinese government had “fucked” Microsoft, and concluded, “It was a statement my work had been in vain.” (Gates denied the episode.) That comment indicated that Lee saw his role in leading a corporation’s China effort as one that brought the company into harmony with the demands of the government.
Despite Microsoft’s saber rattling, Lee would get his chance to work with Google. On September 13, Judge Steven Gonzalez ruled that while Lee was prohibited from sharing proprietary information with or helping Google in competitive areas such as search and speech technologies, he could participate in planning and recruiting for Google’s effort in China. Ultimately, the two companies would settle, and the restrictions on Lee’s activities would be lifted in 2006.
Google.cn went live on January 27, 2006. Earlier in the month, Brin and Page had showed the product to Googlers at a TGIF. The question-and-answer session “was honest and frank,” says Sunny Oh, an American who had helped pull together the presentation. She remembers one employee in particular standing at the microphone and aggressively challenging Larry to say just why this was a good thing for Google.
It was something that people outside Google wanted to know as well. Just before the launch, Schmidt, appearing before the annual gathering of string pullers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, explained the company’s reasoning: “We concluded that although we weren’t wild about the restrictions, it was even worse to not try to serve those users at all.” On Google’s official blog, Andrew McLaughlin (whose hellish job it was to become the chief defender of a policy design he had argued against) allowed an apologetic tone to creep into his prose. “To some people, a hard compromise may not feel as satisfying as a withdrawal on principle,” he wrote. “But we believe it’s the best way to work toward the results we all desire.”
As soon as Google.cn went live, Google’s critics made their own assessments on the “evil scale.” The verdict was that Google’s algorithms had done a scary-good job in preventing Chinese citizens from accessing forbidden information. The New York Times described what awaited people who tried to seek out the truth from Google.cn:
[T]he first page of results for “Falun Gong,” they discovered, consisted solely of anti–Falun Gong sites. Google’s image searching engine—which hunts for pictures—produced equally skewed results. A query for “Tiananmen Square” omitted many iconic photos of the protest and the crackdown. Instead it produced tourism pictures of the square lighted up at night and happy Chinese couples posing before it.
On the other hand, Google had stuck by its intention to inform users when it blocked information to conform to Chinese law. It had done so without seeking permission from the government. To Larry Page, that extra bit of explanation—making explicit what was perfectly obvious to all but the densest Chinese users—had the potential of a snowball rolling down a
mountain. Maybe rubbing the censorhip in the faces of the Chinese users would make them so mad that they would no longer tolerate it.
There was an alternative interpretation, however: the rulers of China had managed to get even the freedom lovers at Google to compromise their principles, sending a message that resistance was hopeless. You could take your choice.
Christopher Smith had no difficulty making that choice. A representative from New Jersey who chaired the House Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Operations, he had been following the activities of U.S. technology companies in China for some months. What he had found appalled him. Yahoo had provided the Chinese government the identity of a dissident journalist—whom the Chinese had thrown in prison. Microsoft had shut down a dissident blog at the Chinese government’s request. Cisco had provided the Chinese with Internet tools that had become critical components in its Great Firewall. And now Google—the warm, fuzzy company that wore its morality on its T-shirt—was China’s partner in political censorship. Since the unofficial company motto presented him with a large bull’s-eye, he could not resist a shot.
“It is astounding that Google, whose corporate philosophy is ‘don’t be evil,’ would enable evil by cooperating with China’s censorship policies just to make a buck,” he said in a press release. “… Many Chinese have suffered imprisonment and torture in the service of truth—and now Google is collaborating with their persecutors.”
On February 1, 2006, Smith’s subcommittee held a hearing, but none of the offending Internet companies chose to attend. Smith and similarly indignant representatives scheduled a second hearing, this time with a more coercive approach. The title of the session was “The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?”
Besides Smith the committee included California congressman Tom Lantos. As the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress, his personal mission was to stamp out genocide and suppression and to dole out retribution to those who tolerated oppressive foreign regimes. There was no doubt where he stood on the issue of the Internet and China. “The launch last week of the censored Chinese Google website,” Lantos said at the February 1 hearing, “is only the latest sign that the companies that make strong and impressive corporate claims, such as Google’s motto, ‘Don’t be evil,’ cannot or do not want to respect human rights when business interests are at stake.”
The Google representative at this hearing would have to endure hostile questioning alongside punching bags from Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and Yahoo. Who at Google would take the bullet? The recently hired vice president of communications and policy, Elliot Schrage.
“My background was the most relevant,” he would later say to explain why he was chosen. He had once represented the Gap when it was defending itself against charges of labor violations. Schrage had never testified before Congress before, but he knew what was in store for him. No matter how cogent his arguments, his role was to act as Tom Lantos’s piñata. Complicating matters was his personal history. Schrage’s grandparents had died in the Holocaust. So even though he disagreed with Lantos, he felt a connection with him.
On February 15, Room 2172 of the Rayburn House Office Building was packed. Reporters were approached by a stream of people from various human rights groups distributing leaflets and reports documenting the misguided or just plain immoral cooperation that these companies were lending to the regime that had murdered its citizens in Tiananmen Square. (By the end of the day there were enough pages to fill a Russian novel.) Less than five minutes after calling the session to order, Chris Smith was praising a recent book entitled IBM and the Holocaust, which had documented with devastating detail how Big Blue had sold the Germans technology that had allowed them to murder 6 million Jews and other targets more efficiently, including Tom Lantos’s family.
“U.S. technology companies today are engaged in a similar sickening collaboration,” Smith said. Whoa. He cited Yahoo’s despicable act in providing the identity of an anonymous blogger. What if Yahoo had been operating during World War II and had been asked by the Germans to turn over Anne Frank? he asked. Then he got to Google. “Should businesses enable the continuation of repressive dictatorships … by cooperating with laws that violate basic human rights?” he asked somewhat rhetorically. Google, he charged, could no longer lay claim to its “Don’t be evil” standard. “Indeed,” he said, “it has become evil’s accomplice.”
The technology executives had to stand and be sworn in with upraised hands, knowing that a photo of them doing so would appear in the next day’s news. Thus the darlings of the information economy—who assumed that their companies were boons to society—were presented as no different from tobacco executives or mobsters. Each company representative entered written testimony on the record and gave brief verbal summaries. Schrage’s was a well-argued treatise that summarized the paradox of a nonevil company conducting an evil act: “The requirements of doing business in China include self-censorship—something that runs counter to Google’s most basic values and commitments as a company.” The rest of the document explained the circumstances that, he argued, justified that transgression.
During the questioning, the legislators asked Schrage to explain how Google determined which sites it would block from the organic results produced by its algorithms. Schrage outlined Google’s clever learning process that identified which sites the Chinese wanted to block. Congressman Jim Leach was appalled. “In all industries, we have heard the term ‘best practices.’ I think you have just affirmed a novelty in American commerce—worst practices,” he said. “So, if this Congress wanted to learn how to censor, we would go to you, the company that should symbolize the greatest freedom of information in the history of man?”
At that point Representative Lantos entered the room; he had been at the hearing for the opening remarks but had left for some unexplained business. His colleagues immediately turned the floor over to the star interrogator. Lantos was an old man, and he was an angry one. The poison tip to his darts was the Hungarian accent he still retained, a constant reminder of his origins. As his questioning proceeded, his volume rose until he was almost shouting. It was reminiscent of the scene in the movie Marathon Man, where an elderly Jewish survivor spots the war criminal played by Laurence Olivier on 47th Street and dogs him, howling, “Stop him! He’s a beast! He’s a murderer!”
“Mis-ter Schrage,” said Lantos. “You have just indicated that you are not proud, and are not enthusiastic. Can you say in English that you are ashamed of what you and your company and the other companies have done?”
Schrage did his best to answer unemotionally. “Congressman, I actually cannot.”
“Cannot,” repeated Lantos, barely able to contain his contempt.
One by one, Lantos asked the other representatives of the high-tech firms the same question: were they ashamed? None would admit it. There was more than a bit of theater in the presentation—and it was certainly easier to flog technology companies that were trying to navigate this difficult international dilemma than it was to pass laws to help them. (No legislation emerged from the hearings.) Nonetheless, Lantos had once stared down the devil, and when he said that the behavior of these companies was abhorrent and disgraceful and professed not to understand how its leaders could sleep at night, he was articulating concerns that Google itself had been debating. Lantos died two years later, but his words rang in Google’s ears for a long time.
3
“Most Chinese don’t speak English. They will never use Google.”
In 2006, Google China had a coming-out party. The occasion was Google’s adoption of a new name. Since names are accorded tremendous significance in China, a lot of care was devoted to the process. An exact transliteration of Google was out of the question: it sounded too much like Gou-gou, which meant “dog-dog.” Culturally, this was humiliating. After months of research, in 2004 Google settled on something pronounced Goo-go-a. It seemed to reflect the quirkiness of the original name. The first syllable evoked
a bird call, and go-a means “fruit.” But critics immediately seized on the name as being overly cute. Also, one translation of the name meant “wandering and enough,” which implied a lack of initiative. Like every actual or perceived misstep Google would make in China, the misguided name was viewed as proof of the American company’s inability to grasp the intricacies of Chinese culture. (And how could such a company provide the essential information that a Chinese person would look for in a search engine?) So in 2006, Goo-go-a was replaced by GuGe, which translated to “valley song.” “It didn’t have any negative meaning, and the priority was to get a Chinese name as soon as possible,” says Dandan Wu, a member of the “landing team” that helped establish Google China.
For the launch, Google produced a video that showed animated nature scenes in the style of traditional ink brush painting. Over a sound track of wooden flute and tweeting birds, a gentle female voice made the connection between a song of the valley and the seething digital infrastructure that makes up Google’s products.