The Chinese market continues to whisper its siren song. Google, the internet giant, is reportedly planning its return to China with a search app that would comply with the Chinese government's censorship requirements. It may seem like a curious move for a company whose motto was once "Don't Be Evil." Now, however, its motto is "Do The Right Thing" — and that would seem to include tackling a huge and growing market that Google is effectively excluded from today.
Google was once a major player in the Chinese internet. It operated a Chinese-language search engine through its U.S. website, Google.com, but the company decided to offer a locally based version — Google.cn — in 2006. To do so, it had to comply with Chinese laws that strictly regulated content. That, Google explained, was consistent with company policy in other jurisdictions. Moreover, "while removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission." Google did, however, inform users when information was removed from search results.
That position worked until 2010 when Google revealed that its computers had been hacked and the accounts of Chinese dissidents living abroad penetrated. While the Chinese government denied any responsibility for the attacks, Google decided to abandon its China-based search engine and instead routed users to an uncensored version based in Hong Kong. The move made it easier for Chinese authorities to block access to the site and thus search, along with other Google services like YouTube, Google Docs and Gmail, remained out of reach ever since.