Google Ethics Case

A fundamental precept for international companies is compliance with the law of the nation in which they do business. But a recurrent dilemma is what happens when that "national law" (e.g. state censorship in China) collides with the corporation's global ethical standards (e.g. "no censorship" for a media company)?

The answers are not easy--or uniform. They depend, greatly, on the corporation's deeply held values and on strongly held views of important stakeholders (shareholders, creditors, employees, customers, suppliers).

I personally believe complying with the Chinese government’s oppressive demands was unethical and that facilitating censorship and suppression was morally unacceptable.

On Tuesday 1/12/10, Google reported that Gmail in China had been hacked, putting the emails and contacts of their users in jeopardy. Shortly thereafter it emerged that the likely hacker was the Chinese government itself, and that human rights activists' accounts were specifically targeted.

In a post on its Web site from its chief legal officer, Google said that recent, repeated hacker attacks originating from China had compromised its intellectual property and threatened the confidentiality of "gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists." These events, Google said, raise issues of security, privacy and global free speech.

On Jan. 12, 2010, Google's top executives reached a decision. Page had joined Brin in deciding to end Google's experiment in censorship. In any case, the company decided it would no longer carry out censorship for the Chinese government.

After several weeks of negotiations with the Chinese government, Google announced on March 22, 2010 that it was redirecting users of google.cn--its China-based search engine--to google.com.hk where results are not filtered or censored. Google will keep some R&D and advertising on the mainland.

For Google, it was a clever maneuver in very difficult circumstances. The company did not back down from its...