Google in China

Early 2006 was the moment Google has begun collaboration with People's Republic of China and launched google.cn, another version of the search-engine giant that was to be controlled from within PRC. Google had to consider their decisions and operations in concordance with the Communist government of China, which restricted any content that was considered to be illegal from search results. Google had then become an official Chinese Internet Service Provider (ISP), which implied that the legal provisions imposed by Chinese law had to be fulfilled. At that time, the giant's decision to self-censor itself was highly debated; actual circumstances forced Google to re-examine operating activities and past choices.

Since the entering into the Chinese market of the U.S.-based site Google.com, in 1999, the search engine faced strong competition from the already-agreeing-to-self-censor U.S. alternatives Yahoo! and Microsoft MSN. Also, escalating competition came from the Chinese search-engine, Baidu.com, which gained a 55% increase in market share in only 5 years (from 2002 to 2007, from 3% to 58%). Therefore, in order for Google not to lose terrain in front of its competitors, the company decided to reconsider its position in terms of censorship in front of the Committee on International Relations of the U.S. House of Representatives and defended the position held by self-censoring the search-engine.

Google's motto "Don't be evil", as long as its primary mission- to permit free flow of information through networking environment all around the world, did not seem to match the vision of the Chinese government in what concerns the information-flow restriction. But the U.S giant had to act in accordance with the Chinese law if it ever wanted to gain a highly competitive position on the market and become an official ISP for PRC. From its humble beginnings, the Google Corporation embraced the ethical business conduct; Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of the number one search engine, firmly insisted that Google became "universally accessible", meaning that the circulation of information in the networking environment should remain unrestricted. They also refused to make ethical sacrifices in order to bring profit to the shareholders. How come they turned, though, to self-censoring information in order to enter and stay on the Chinese market? The Chinese political scene is a factor of utter importance that has influenced greatly Google's activity in China.

China, alongside its entering in the World Trade Organization (WTO), has increased its international openness, not only from the perspective of exports, but from that of the amount of information and services that entered the Chinese market. This flow of information into the country was a sensitive issue to discuss in PRC- information that could have harmed the state security was considered to be illegal. The Chinese Minister of Public