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< Posted 2010-3-25 14:54 Only show this user's posts
Co-founder's memories of Soviet repression spurred Google's decison to quit China
Google co-founder Sergey Brin Source: Bloomberg
BEHIND Google's dramatic decision to close its China-based search engine this week was co-founder Sergey Brin's change of heart about the compromises required to do business in a land that was increasingly reminding him of his native Soviet Union.
The beginning of that change came just after the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Mr Brin said in an interview about the China decision.
As the glow of the Olympics faded, he said, the Chinese government began cranking up its web censorship and interfering more with Google's business.
Around that time, he said, the murky rules of doing business in China grew even murkier.
"China was ever-present," he said. "One out of five meetings I attended had some component that applied to China in a different way than other countries."
Mr Brin said he was also moved by growing evidence in China of repressive behaviour he remembered from the Soviet Union, which he and his parents fled when he was six years old.
He said memories of that time - having his home visited by Russian police; the anti-Semitic discrimination against his father - emboldened his view that it was time to abandon Google's policy.
China has "made great strides against poverty and whatnot," Mr Brin said. "But nevertheless, in some aspects of their policy, particularly with respect to censorship, with respect to surveillance of dissidents, I see the same earmarks of totalitarianism, and I find that personally quite troubling."
On January 12, Google said it would stop self-censoring its search engine in China, citing cyber-attacks it believes were motivated by an attempt to spy on Chinese activists' emails.
On Monday, Google implemented that policy, routing mainland users of its search engine to a site in Hong Kong that the company wasn't censoring.
The cyber attacks were the "straw that broke the camel's back," Mr Brin said. A heated debate in the company about whether to cease censoring ensued, say people familiar with the matter.
Mr Brin and other executives prevailed over chief executive Eric Schmidt and others who felt that Google ought to stay the course in China to continue to push its principles from the inside, say people familiar with the discussions.
"We did have a long conversation about it, several long conversations," Mr Brin said. "We heard all the arguments."
When asked if Mr Schmidt and co-founder Larry Page were available for comment, a Google spokeswoman said Mr Brin was speaking on behalf of the company.
What's next for Google in China is uncertain.
Its business is in jeopardy. Some partners - like Hong Kong media company TOM Group - dropped their search agreements with Google, citing the need to abide by Chinese law.
Employees are contemplating defecting to rivals like Microsoft, according to recruiters.
Beijing has called the move "totally wrong" and internet experts are sceptical that China will let Google continue to route traffic from its China site to Hong Kong.
While Google isn't censoring that site, China's routine Internet filters are blocking some results for users in China.
Mr Brin's doubts over Google's early agreement to censor in China hark back to his childhood in the Soviet Union, which he and his family left in 1979 to escape anti-Semitism.
Mr Brin was six, but he said he is reminded of the constant fear of surveillance through memories such as police visiting his family's apartment to question his parents after they made the decision to emigrate.
To this day, Mr Brin said, he and his family often reflect on the significance of the move. His father, he said, wanted to be an astrophysicist, but because of ethnic discrimination became a mathematician. He relished the freedom to pursue "his own entrepreneurial dreams," he said. His father became a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland.
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Mr Brin's decision was all his own versions of faults that live inside his own body and mentally abrasive if people attentively read his lines of unfruitful defense and excuses. It is just as well better for Google to leave behind him a story of fluke_shot that has made it to the world net. Imagine a guy who ran away from his 'home' to call his 'home' a rat_shit Russia; while telling to a world of people that his current ‘home address’ is an angel that is allowed to go on killing, destroying and censoring in all sorts of manners as though a sort of satanic freedom allows it to do so!
When stopped, these bloody hypocrites try to bite hard and buck like a pariah dog in challenges!
What a shitty hypocrite who refuses to respect laws and rules of a host nation while preferring to play ‘cowboys and red_indians in battle fields’! By mathematical term, he should NOT have been brought up the way he is behaving, isn’t it?
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