The Secret Swede

In a blogpost on Google’s official blog tonight the company is delivering a direct attack on the Chinese government and states that Google has had enough and will effectively stop censuring its search results in China. The firm lists three points for taking this momentous decision:

1- Google and a number of other organizations have lately been a target for a sophisticated cyber attack on its corporate infrastructure originating in China
2- Evidence that the attackers’ main object have been to gain access to Gmail accounts of human rights activists inside China
3- Evidence that Gmail accounts of a large number of human rights activists in U.S., Europe and China has been regularly accessed by third parties. This has been achieved through using illegitimate methods such as phishing attacks and malware installed on user’s computer.

Google declares:

“We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered—combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web—have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

Now, stop for a second and think about which other public company would pull out of the most lucrative market in the world, for a good cause? To me, it looks like Google continues to live up to its “Do No Evil” mantra. I really hope more companies will follow suit.

The entire post can be found here.