Google and China
CASE ANALYSIS ASSIGNMENT ON
GOOGLE AND CHINA
AROH,
NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY
Globalization has brought vast number of changes around the world. It made the persons to compete globally. In this platform every individual is treated one and the same around the world without any discrimination. Many corporate organizations are integrated with this platform. But ethical standards of one country vary from other country. This is what happened in the case of Google with China. Due to Google.com is often experiencing slow and unavailable service it launched Google.cn. But it could not provide the whole access to china users, instead they censored some websites according to the legal advice and ethical code of China government. Here it could not fulfill its corporate mission of providing internet freedom to china users. “On Feb 15th 2006 after the official launch of Google.cn, the committee on International relations of U.S. Congress held a hearing in which private companies, scholars, and government leaders were invited to make statements regarding internet freedom in china and the roles played by American technological firms”.(Steve May, 2nd edition, p 287). Google vice president for corporate and public affairs given an official statement to launch china based search engine. For maintaining the commitment for uncensored Google.com to Chinese users it lost the market share in China. Thus Google got two options like stay away from china or to establish local presence in china. At this moment “An argument made by some companies is that censorship is acceptable if Chinese users are honestly told what is happening. This is what Google is making, because the Chinese Google site included a disclaimer at the bottom informing some users that some information is being censored”. (Steve May, 2nd edition, p289). From the remarks made by human rights organization Google continued its business till 2010, but after attack on Gmail accounts Google is forced to change its strategy. Thus Google decided to exit from china if the china government doesn’t agree for Google end of censorship. In 2012 Google added a new feature which warns the users who enters the keywords that produce blocked results.
The most important stakeholders that Google management has to consider in decision making