In his op-ed, Eric Schmidt reflects on Google's controversial decision to enter the Chinese market in 2006, acknowledging the challenges of complying with local censorship laws while aiming to provide access to information. He discusses the backlash faced from global critics and shareholders regarding human rights issues but remains optimistic about the potential for increased information access in China through Google's presence. Schmidt concludes that despite ethical dilemmas, entering the market has been a step toward fostering democratic access to information.

1. Sharon Turnoy
NY Times Op Ed by Eric Schmidt on Google’s Decision to Enter China
July 20, 2008
Google in China: Did We “Do No Evil”?
By Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google
All eyes are on China as they prepare for the Summer Olympics to open on August 8. In
the aftermath of the Tibetan riots in March, the earthquake in the Sichuan Province in
May, and China’s recent denunciations of the Dalai Lama (interspersed with
negotiations between his envoys and ministers of the PRC), now is a good time to look
back on Google’s decision to enter the Chinese market in 2006 and gauge the effect
that we have had there.
When we began contemplating a search engine in China, we faced a difficult decision.
The PRC had put in place the Golden Shield Project, aka the “Great Firewall of China.”
To do business on the Internet there, we would have to agree to self-censor certain
content. Although 99.9 percent of all information is available to Chinese citizens, that
special .01 percent that we had to censor consisted of topics such as human rights
violations, police brutality, religious freedom, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989,
the Dalai Lama, and the International Tibet Independence Movement, among others.
Essentially, we would have to eliminate anything that the Communist government of the
PRC might feel was politically sensitive. When Chinese citizens googled those topics,
Google.cn would display this statement: “According to the local laws, regulations and
policies, part of the search result is not shown.”
Censorship just didn’t feel right, and in many ways it went directly against our values of
free, democratic access to information. We faced a complex dilemma: Filtering our
search results would clearly compromise our mission to organize the world’s information
and make it universally accessible. However, failing to offer Google search at all to a
fifth of the world’s population would compromise our mission far more severely.
This dilemma was especially close to Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s heart. He was
born in Moscow during the Communist era. Access to any information, he argued, was
better than access to none at all. Others argued that making a profit in the Chinese
market was, in effect, profiting from the many human rights abuses that have been
documented there.
After much soul-searching, we made the decision to enter China and obey their laws.
We made the decision to trust that individual Chinese citizens would see that they
weren’t getting all the information available, especially because they would see our
displayed statement that not all search results were being shown. Our hope was that
Chinese citizens would agitate for more freedom of information and that, ultimately, a
legal system allowing the open expression of information would flourish in China.

2. Sharon Turnoy
NY Times Op Ed by Eric Schmidt on Google’s Decision to Enter China
Page 2
So we announced our decision to launch Google.cn.
Then came the backlash. If we thought we had faced difficult arguments amongst
ourselves before we announced our decision, it was nothing compared to the vitriolic
responses that we received from the rest of the world after our announcement. This
backlash culminated in a resolution brought to Google shareholders by the New York
City Pension Fund in 2007. They proposed that Google “must make special efforts to
avoid being seen as complicit in human rights abuses…and not be proactive in
censorship.” Given our widely broadcast intent to help open access, not close it, our
shareholders voted this resolution down.
So what’s happened since then? Has our experiment in nurturing freedom of access
succeeded in China, or have we merely bent to political pressure to make a buck?
To evaluate these questions objectively, we must look at the facts: As of March 31,
2008, China has unblocked access to some Internet web sites, including most of
English Wikipedia, as part of an agreement with the International Olympic Committee.
(I’d say this is a good sign.)
Mainland Chinese agencies continue to issue regulations about the Internet (a bad
sign), but these are often not enforced (a good sign). Some legal scholars have pointed
out that the frequency with which the PRC government issues new regulations about
the Internet is a symptom of their ineffectiveness, as the old ones on similar topics
appear to be ignored or forgotten.
My own sense is that anyone who wants access to blocked information can eventually
get it in a variety of ways that have nothing to do with Google.cn, except perhaps for the
awareness they gain from our search results when we notify them that they are not
seeing the entire picture.
However, none of this is to say that the “Great Firewall” is not still in effect. Internet
censorship in the PRC encourages self-censorship—perhaps in one of the most
insidious ways—through the perception that users are being watched, whether they
actually are or not, and could (and unfortunately often do) suffer economic or legal
repercussions as a result. (Witness the imprisonment of Chinese journalist Shi Tao in
2005 after email information about him was demanded from Yahoo.)
With the increasing popularity of social media, though, including blogs, texting, and
IM’ing, much of which we are investing in there, I remain confident that Google’s entry
into the PRC is doing more good than harm to the efforts of democratic access to
information in China. Some have said that we have failed to “do no evil” (Google’s
internal company slogan), but instead have merely done “less evil” than if we had not

3. Sharon Turnoy
NY Times Op Ed by Eric Schmidt on Google’s Decision to Enter China
Page 3
gone into China at all. While we may have to live with this compromise until free
speech reigns in China, I am satisfied that with the progress that is being made, it was
still the right decision to enter the market there.
## 913 words ##
Eric Schmidt
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recruited Eric Schmidt from Novell, where
he led that company's strategic planning, management and technology development as
chairman and CEO. Since coming to Google, Eric has focused on building the corporate
infrastructure needed to maintain Google's rapid growth as a company and on ensuring
that quality remains high while product development cycle times are kept to a minimum.
Along with Larry and Sergey, Eric shares responsibility for Google's day-to-day
operations. Eric's Novell experience culminated a 20-year record of achievement as an
Internet strategist, entrepreneur and developer of great technologies. His well-seasoned
perspective perfectly complements Google's needs as a young and rapidly growing
search engine with a unique corporate culture.