The New York Times praises Google’s decision to (finally) challenge China’s draconian censorship laws but Google’s David Drummond, the company’s chief legal officer, offers James Fallows at the Atlantic an insider’s view:
It may not be quite obvious that this is not really a “shutdown” of either our operations in China or of our mainland China-focused web site. We have moved the physical location of it [to Hong Kong], and the virtual location. The experience we are trying to offer to Chinese users is like the one on Google.cn, but done without the censorship on our part.
[Would this make any difference to users in mainland China, whose search results are still going to be “filtered” by the Great Firewall?] There is a difference in that we are censoring nothing. The Firewall can block access to certain kinds of search results regardless of how you get to them. They are treating Google.com.hk – treating it like Google.com [that is, as a foreign source that is screened by the Firewall]….
People tended to see this as an all or nothing kind of battle between us and the Chinese government, and that based on what we said, we were either going to pull out of China entirely, or else say, Never Mind! From the beginning our view had been, we would like to stay in China and have an operation there and serve the market there, and serve it as locally as we can. We’re just not willing to censor the search results any more.
I think there has been some grumbling or people questioning whether this is some kind of “deal” with the Chinese government. That’s not the case. We had conversations with the government. Would they be willing to lift the search- censorship … requirements, in terms of the substance and even more the lack of transparency? They made it clear that the self-censorship policy as it is now practiced was not going to change.