DITCHING CHINA: In early 2010,
Google proudly declared that they were done with China. They weren’t gonna put up with censorship,
propaganda, or the CCP. Google was built to make the all information easily accessible and useful,
not just the information that the CCP liked. With that, Google began redirecting all search
traffic from China to an uncensored Hong Kong version of Google. For obvious reasons,
the CCP was livid. This was their country and they got to set the rules. The only reason
they even let Google in was because Google had agreed to play by the rules years ago. But now,
they suddenly wanted to fight censorship? Hell no, that was unacceptable. The CCP would threaten to
ban Google entirely if they didn’t return to their previous arrangement. Google’s CEO at the time,
Eric Schmidt, was more than happy to do this. He had worked years to build up relations with China,
and he didn’t want to lose out the world’s largest consumer market just to fight this
moral battle. After all, China wasn’t gonna change their policies on censorship just because
Google left the country. They would find someone else who’s willing to play ball by their rules,
so Google might as well be that person. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin however, had
a different perspective. They felt that principles should always come before profit and here, it was
clear that China was asking Google to bend their principles, and this duo was no longer willing to
do that. They also weren’t intimated by China’s threats to ban them. Who were they to ban Google?
Google was the one that was gonna ban China. They proudly announced “We believe strongly that
in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company
that does good things for the world." And with that, Google had left China. Starting in March 31,
2010, all Google searches from mainland China were met with a DNS error. Google had made their stance
on censorship crystal clear and they would simply double down on this stance in the coming years.
I don’t think you’d be surprised to hear that their marketshare in China would get crushed as
a result. In 2010, Google boasted a solid 29% marketshare in China, but by the end of 2013,
this number would drop to just 1.7%. Google had effectively forfeited their chances in China,
so Larry and Sergey figured that they might as well make it official. Starting in 2014,
Google, Gmail, Chrome, YouTube, and more would all become unavailable in mainland China. This was the
legacy of Larry Page and Sergey Brin in China, but all of this would change in 2015. In late 2015,
a new CEO would be announced: Sundar Pichai. From very early on, Sundar would begin defending the
idea of Google returning to China. He would go onto host a developer conference in China,
and launch a bunch of developer tools. These included developers.google.cn,
developer.android.cn, and firebase.google.cn. Since then, Google has been hard at work
rebuilding their relationship with China. In fact, it’s alleged that at one point they were
even building a spying tool for China. So, here’s how Google went from ditching China to
fight censorship to building a surveillance tool just to get back in the good graces of the CCP.
A TRUCE:
Taking a look back, Google has been flirting with the Chinese market for well over two decades now.
Their earliest attempt to appeal to a Chinese audience can be traced all the way back to
September of 2000. This is when Google announced the ability to use Google.com in simplified and
traditional Chinese. But, it wasn’t until Eric Schmidt took over as CEO in 2001 that
Google really started pursuing the Chinese market. China was never a top priority though. After all,
Google was still working on launching a bunch of foundational products. Keep in mind,
Gmail and YouTube weren't even a thing yet. But, as Google’s western product stack matured
and the company went public, Eric turned his focus onto the Chinese market. To him, it was
clear that this was the next frontier along with India. But, given that India was an open market,
he would spend much of international effort on cracking China. Fortunately for Google,
China was surprisingly open to letting Google operate in the country as long as they stuck
to some ground rules, primarily don’t show stuff that makes us look bad. From the very beginning,
this became a point of controversy for anti-censorship advocates around the world. But,
Larry and Sergey had a much more optimistic perspective. They figured, sure we’ll have
to censor if we enter China, but we can probably get away with less censorship than native Chinese
search engines. So, they were still effectively reducing censorship in China overall. And with
that in mind, Google.cn would launch in 2006. From the very beginning, Google would begin pushing the
boundaries with China. Not only did they censor less results, but when they did censor results,
they had a pop up telling users that results had been censored. This move pissed of the CCP
as Google didn’t ask for permission before implementing this pop up. The CCP said that
this move was like coming over for dinner and saying ‘I’ll eat the food, but I don’t like it’.
To make things worse, Google’s rebellious characteristics tended to rub off on Chinese
search engines like Baidu. Really, Chinese search engines had no choice but to follow suit.
Otherwise, they would simply bleed marketshare to Google. While the CCP was no doubt unhappy,
they also weren’t willing to push out Google so early. You see, much of the Chinese internet
was just bad knockoffs of American websites. Google was one of the first well engineered
platforms to be launched in the country, so it was in their best interest to keep Google
around as they brought in a substantial amount of knowledge, funding, and talent. The bottomline
was that the only reason Google was allowed in China was because China needed Google. So,
the CCP bit their tongue and let Google carry on with their shenanigans. But, in the end, it seemed
like Google was winning. They were successfully fighting Chinese censorship by expanding to
China. Not to mention, they were making a bunch of money. By late 2009, Google controlled over a
third of the Chinese search market. But then, if things were going so well, what happened?
THE CCP BACKSTABS:
Ironically, it wasn’t actually censorship concerns that pushed Google out of China.
For the most part, China was letting Google have their way when it came to pushing the boundaries.
The factor that actually pushed out Google was Chinese greed. Remember how we talked about
the CCP wanting Google to help develop China’s tech industry. Well, that was going pretty well,
but China wanted more progress. China didn’t want to wait out the full cycle of engineers working at
Google, then leaving Google and starting their own companies, and then hiring more Chinese engineers,
and training them, and so on. It would take several years if not decades for this to
naturally play out and for Google’s knowledge to spread across the Chinese tech industry. So,
China figured, why wait that long when we can just have it now and with that,
China would launch operation Aurora. Starting in mid 2009, China would start a massive cyber attack
not just against Google but against most of the American tech industry. This included companies
like Yahoo, Adobe, Juniper Networks, and even Morgan Stanley. Their target at each of these
firms was their source code which was ironically something that these firms didn’t really protect.
They were spending billions on protecting personal data, financial profiles, and credit card numbers,
but they had never considered protecting their source code to the same caliber. Their secret
sauce was really their branding, positioning, and user base, not their source code. I mean,
just because you or me have Google’s source code doesn't mean that we’ll become the next
Google. For China, however, that was actually the case. With the source code of these companies,
the CCP could create their own tech giants that their citizens would have to use. This of course
put off Google but it didn’t push them over the edge just yet. The reality was that many
of their biggest projects like Android and Chrome were already open source, so it’s not like China
stole too much, but they were by no means done. Next, the CCP would target Google’s intellectual
property which was much more valuable. But even this, didn’t push Google over the edge. The nail
in the coffin came soon after though when the CCP started hacking into Gmail. But, wait a minute,
there’s nothing special about Gmail. If Google was willing to overlook intellectual property theft,
why did they care about Gmail so much? Well, it wasn’t for the source code. The
CCP couldn’t care less about the source code of an email platform. What they were really after
was human rights activists. They were looking to identify the individuals behind problematic email
addresses so that they could go ahead and off them. Google had had it with the CCP and their
antics. On January 12, 2010, they would publicly state “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.” And this leads us to the dramatic withdrawal that we detailed
at the beginning of the video. But, as we also mentioned, this withdrawal didn’t last forever.
GOOGLE CRAWLS BACK:
The bottomline was that Google didn’t realize how independent China’s tech industry had become since
their entry. And instead of getting crushed by censorship, the Chinese tech industry actually
blew up in the early 2010s without Google. Companies like Xiaomi, Tencent, Alibaba,
Huawei, Baidu, and JD.com were crushing it growing to multi deca billion if not multi
hundred billion dollar valuations. And unlike Google, these companies were willing to play by
any rules the CCP set. You could say that Google had a bit of FOMO, but under Larry’s leadership,
Google wasn’t wiling to backtrack on their decision to leave China. All of this would
change when Sundar Pichai took over though. It’s not that Sundar is evil or that he loves the CCP,
but as a non founder CEO, he did have the pressure to constantly please shareholders. He couldn’t
just ignore them like most founders tend to do. And from his perspective, the easiest way to
continue growth was attacking the Chinese market. This is exactly what Apple was doing and they were
getting extraordinary results. So, Sundar started off by appealing to Chinese developers. He would
host a developer conference in China at the end of 2016 where a bunch of Chinese specific
development tools would be announced. But, he wasn’t happy with just this. What he really wanted
was to bring back Google search to China, but given their dramatic exit, China wasn’t exactly
ecstatic to let them back in. Not to mention, they no longer needed Google either. So, Google had to
convince China to let them back in which brings us to project Dragonfly. On the surface, Dragonfly
was just a censored version of Google search, but behind the scenes, it was a lot more nefarious.
According to the Incercept, the project allegedly entailed collecting peoples search history,
location history, and other private data and sharing all of it with a Chinese company,
presumably for surveillance purposes. When this got leaked to the media though, Google not only
had to deal with a bunch of public backlash but also a bunch of internal protests. So,
unsurprisingly, they would kill the project just a few months later at the end of 2018.
GOOGLE’S FUTURE IN CHINA:
Since all of this took place, privacy has become a top concern when it comes
to these big tech companies, so Sundar has very much shifted his tone when it comes to China.
He has since clarified that the company has no plans of relaunching in China. Who knows though,
with the current recession and stagnating growth, China may very well be something that
Google considers once again. But, the truth is that whether they reenter China or not,
they have already lost to the CCP. The reality is that the CCP played Google brilliantly. They lured
them in with the appeal of a large consumer market. Then, they stole all of their source
code and IP. And finally, they pushed them out never to return. Meanwhile, Google was led to
believe that they were doing the moral thing by stepping outside of China when in reality, they
were just making room for up and coming Chinese companies to take their place. And today, it’s
Google that wants China, not the other way around and that’s the sad story of Google China. Do you
think Google should have left China? Comment that down below. Also, drop a like if you would like to
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