Google and China

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Recommended: The failure of Google in China

In 2006, Google made a deal with the People’s Republic of China to launch Google.cn, a modified version of the American Google search engine. Because of Chinese censorship laws, Google was required to become an Internet service provider in China, as well as censor search results in order to remove any results that are considered illegal in China (Wilson). This means that Google was implying that the vision for their company could comply with the self-censorship laws in China, however, being an American company, they received much criticism about whether their decision was ethical.
A factor in Google’s extreme success was the fact that they provided many more services than just a search engine. In fact, Google is used for translation services, email, and blog hosting, among various other things. With the amount of services provided, users input much of their personal information. The company had done an excellent job of storing and protecting their users personal information. This created a trust between the company and their customers, which plays a part in Google’s overall success. When Google.cn was launched, however, this trust between the company and its customers was threatened.
The decision to launch Google.cn was met by huge issues in the quality Google was able to produce. Due to the censorship, results were much slower and less accurate than the product produced in the United States. This was caused by the fact that all search results had to be passed through an elaborate firewall before it could be displayed to the user. Not only did simple search results suffer, but other services such as Google News and Google Images were unavailable most of the time as well.
Some of the motives to expand into China were based on f...

... middle of paper ...

...ed in front of the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on International Relations … to testify regarding business operations in China” (Wilson).
I think that Google was upholding their mission statement when creating Google.cn, as well as respecting the difference in culture and ethical views in a different country. I think that the American views of what is right and wrong probably caused Google to shut down the search engine because the general American ethical standpoint is that censorship is wrong and I’m sure that the criticism of Americans caused Google to have to choose between loyalty to America and their American customers and holding true to their mission statement, even if they had to do it using another viewpoint on ethics.

Works Cited

Wilson, K. (n.d.). Google in china. Retrieved from
http://www.slideshare.net/saurabh1234567890/google-inchina

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