Revisiting the "Google in China" Question from a Political Economic Perspective (Report‪)‬

On January 27, 2006, Google launched Google.cn--a filtered search engine for Internet users in China. Google's decision has disappointed human rights advocates, Google stockholders, users (Bray, 2006), and U.S. politicians. The Chinese search engine filters words (such as "human rights") deemed sensitive by the Chinese Communist Party. Google feels that a filtered search engine is better than the previous search engine, which was slow and often down. Writing in the official Google blog, Andrew McLaughlin, a senior policy counsel, stated that, "We aren't happy about what we had to do this week, and we hope that over time everyone in the world will come to enjoy full access to information (1)." Google is not the only Internet company that is publicly apologetic about its decision to comply with the Chinese government. In 2002 and 2005, respectively, Yahoo disclosed personally identifiable information about two political dissidents, Wang Xiaoping and Shi Tao. Although Yahoo argued that the U.S. company has little control over the day-to-day operation of the subsidiary in Hong Kong, Yahoo's CEO Jerry Yang said he was disturbed by the situation. Some U.S. politicians shamed Yahoo, Google, Cisco, and Microsoft by calling them the "Gang of Four" for assisting the Chinese government to violate Chinese citizens' freedom of speech and freedom to access information. The four technology companies were summoned to testify in the Congress before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. After all the political fuss, there was no definite measure that the U.S. government and the four companies would implement to ensure the Chinese citizens enjoy freedom to access information.