Google in China Case Study Summary

GOOGLE IN CHINA CASE STUDY SUMMARY

        Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford graduate students and started as college research project. Now, it hold the title of world’s largest search engine ahead of its other competitors.  Other than serving as search engine, Google also offer many other services such as mapping service, e-mail account, blog-hosting service and also own the popular video site YouTube and many other services. Google also has expanded globally to many countries and hosts over 150 country website domains. Google’s mission statement is “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. This mission statement is to assert that Google wants to ensure that everyone can have access to information quickly, easily and efficiently, wherever and whenever. They are providing the platform to look for information that are readily available and without the hassle of sifting through useless particulars and figures. Google also states that they are not doing anything that are against the ethics to increase shareholders’ value.

        Google’s decision to expand their business in China was due to the Chinese internet market that was growing significantly. Before launching the Google.cn, they had already established U.S.-based Google.com that were available to Chinese users as well as other users worldwide. They create a version of search engine that are capable of understanding character-based languages like Chinese, Korean and Japan. This is run out of its headquarters in California. The main advantage of from using Google.com was that Google were able to control estimated 25% of Chinese search market and avoid Chinese government censorship completely. But then, problem arose in 2002 as Chinese users could not anymore access Google.com due to government censorship that were not followed by Google earlier. The censorship was introduced due to Chinese government intention to restrict access to ideas and information that are outlawed in China. The government introduced the Golden Shield Project that use state-of-the-art technology to police Chine internet users. This technology focus on controlling the flow of information over the internet and also oversees everything on the web.

        The problem that struck Google was believed due to Baidu.com, their Chinese competitor’s effort to gain market share by exploiting Google and pulling strings in the government. The stoppage of Google.com could also have been due to heightened Internet security in anticipation of a November 2002 shift in political leadership. This has caused Google’s market share in China to decrease and left Chinese users unsatisfied using the slow version of Google.com. Google are left with decision to be made whether or not to go against their core values in order to establish in Chinese market. The censorship is contrary to Google’s mission that are to satisfy the interest of users and make information available to everybody. Another concern in expanding their market is having to breach user’s privacy to the government of China that is against the human right but must be done according to Chinese government policies.