David Drummond has had a major part to play in the latest stand-off between Google and China. And at the DLD conference in Munich Drummond, the company's vice-president and chief legal officer, explained what happened.
"We were always uncomfortable with China having censored our search results," he said. "We thought by being there we could be a force of openness. In fact, that has not happened. Things have gotten tighter."
Google China was launched in January 2006. For Google.cn the search engine agreed to deliver a Chinese version of Google.com complying with internet censorship laws in the country.
Critics often portrayed that as a capitulation to the "Golden Shield Project" or the "Great Firewall of China". At that time, the company believed that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open internet outweighed their unease at agreeing to censor some results.
That changed. On January 12, Google announced that it was "no longer willing to continue censoring" results on Google.cn after Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists were hacked.
"There were direct attacks on human rights acitivists. Using phishing attacks they tried to access their accounts by third parties," said Drummond. "We discovered that the activist had been under surveillance. And this just became something that we were not willing to do any more."
According to Drummond, the China approach was always an issue at Google. The management team not only had an intense debate when they decided to pull out, but before they decided to go into China. Have they learnt their lesson?
Drummond said: "We want to stay in the Chinese market, we just don't want to filter our search results any more."
Today, the search giant takes internet censorship more seriously. "The thing that is important to recognise is that internet censorship is a real problem, and not just China. It is time for governments to get involved."
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