Googles corporate moto

Dont Be Evil
Priyanka Gupta
Athul Madhusoodanan

Dont be evil. We believe strongly that in the

long term, we will be better servedas
shareholders and in all other waysby a
company that does good things for the world
even if we forgo some short term gains. This is
an important aspect of our culture and is
broadly shared within the company.

Internet censorship in China

Internet company doing business there would have

to filter content that the Communist regime
considered offensive.
Moreover, the Chinese government had demanded
that other U.S. companies identify individuals who
had used the Internet to criticize the authorities. And
at least one dissident had been jailed as a result.

Competitors
Presence
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%

Baidu worked with the government

more closely than other search
companies. They launched a more
aggressive system to censor their
keywords.

They started to censor their search

service earlier and more
extensively than others. Thats why
the government likes Baidu.

Presence

 By 2002, this service had

captured about onequarter of the Chinese
market. However, service
was erratic as search
queries attempted to
traverse the firewall.

Users inside China who

attempted to click on
stories published by
blocked news sources,
such as CNN and the New
York Times, received
repeated error messages.
And it finally was shut
down for few days due to
these difficulties.

The company issued the following

statement:
On balance we believe that having a
service with links that work and omits
a fractional number is better than
having a service that is not available
at all. It was a difficult trade-off for us
to make, but the one we felt
ultimately served the best interests of
our users located in China

Elliot Schrage, Googles vice president for global

communications and public affairs, later explained, Googles
troubles in China were hardly over.
[We] soon discovered new problems. Many queries,
especially politically sensitive queries, were not making it
through to Googles servers. And access became often slow
and unreliable, meaning that our service in China was not
something we felt proud of.
Even though we werent doing any self-censorship, our
results were being filtered anyway, and our service was
being actively degraded on top of that. Indeed, at some
times users were even being redirected to local Chinese
search engines

Contradiction to
philosophy!
Google was allow to operate its search engine in
China as long as it censored information. In direct
contradiction to the organizations philosophy
Google agreed to these terms. By doing so the firm
showed that growth and profitability carried more
weight that the establish beliefs and goals. This
blatant disregard for standing by the Companys
founding principle reduces the firms creditability.

Googles activities to collect data in order to gain a

competitive advantage show that organization is willing to
compromise the trust of its users and industry creditability.
Six years later Google did take a stand against this
censorship and compromises were granted by the
government.

Questions to ponder upon!!

Do businesses have a responsibility to uphold human rights when entering
international markets?
Has Googles decision compromised their business principles, or is providing
some information better for the Chinese people than none at all?
Is Googles refusal to comply with the Department of Justice investigation
contradictory with cooperation with Chinese censorship policies?

ANY Questions??

Thank you!!