Der Spiegel interviewed Google co-founder Sergey Brin about the decision to shift the company’s China-based search engine to Hong Kong:
SPIEGEL: Four years ago, you allowed your service to be censored. Why have you changed your mind now?
Brin: The hacking attacks were the straw that broke the camel’s back. There were several aspects there: the attack directly on Google, which we believe was an attempt to gain access to Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. But there is also a broader pattern we then discovered of simply the surveillance of human rights activists.
SPIEGEL: Was it an error to agree to China’s demands back in 2006?
Brin: When we entered China, we had hoped that we could really help move Internet freedoms there forward. And I think we were partly successful. In the first few years, the kinds of policies we adopted — for example, labeling when there were results omitted — were also adopted by Baidu, the leading local competitor. But things really went backward after the Olympics. We got far more requests for censorship of topics and queries. Furthermore, a number of our other services like YouTube were competely blocked from the country. It was a real step backward, we felt.
SPIEGEL: Some human rights activists argue that you could have achieved more if you had stayed.
Brin: You can always make the argument that a little bit is better than nothing. At some point you have to stand back and challenge this and say, this goes beyond the line of what we’re comfortable with and adopt that for moral reasons.
