At the TED conference in Southern California, Chris Anderson questioned Google founder Sergey Brin about Google’s potential decision to leave China. From a transcript posted on Search Engine Land:
Anderson:
Have you know stopped censoring results in China or is it just a statement of intent and your involved in negotiations now.
Brin:
Yes, we’ve made a statement of intent. That we intend to stop censoring, and you know, if we can do that, within the confines of Chinese policy, we’d love to continue Google.cn and our operations there. And if we cannot, then we’ll do as much as we can but we don’t want to run a service that’s politically censored. I’m not talking about things like porn and gambling and things like that. Political censorship.
Anderson:
You’ve got a mission to the world … there’s hundreds of millions of people in China on the web. I mean, they’re going to feel all completely abandoned, aren’t they, if you leave.
Brin:
I’m an optimist. I want to find a way to really work within the Chinese system and provide more and better information. I think a lot of people think I’m naive, and that may well be true, but I wouldn’t have started a search engine in 1998 if I wasn’t naive.
