Google's Mission, Ethical Principles and Involvement in China - Case Study Example

all, referring to the censorship imposed by the Chinese authorities on Google search engine that were deemed subversive and politically sensitive particularly crackdown of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square (Levin, 2014). This mission has also influenced Google’s strategy to work against censorship and to obey the laws and regulations of the country they are operating in. Such that in 2010, Google became exasperated with China’s censorship policies that it pulled out its operation out of China (Goldman, 2015).

Google’s co-founder Sergei Brin even announced that "our own websites and for the Internet as a whole we have worked tirelessly to combat internet censorship around the world"(Goldman, 2015). The Chinese market however just proved to be too important for Google to ignore that in May of 2012, the company announced “an anti-censorship feature – under the pretext of improving search quality” (Wright, 2013) which is an indication that the company is yielding to the censorship demands of the Chinese authority.

During those times of censorship of the Chinese government against Google, the service of Google deteriorated that it preferred self-censorship over bad and no business and be able to provide more information than no information at all. Self-censorship is Google’s compromise to be able to operate in China that it would be “better to give Chinese users access to a limited amount of information, than to none at all”. This may not be the ideal way for Google to operate in China but it also has to follow the laws and regulation of the country that it is operating in.

Self-censorship to follow the laws and regulations of the host country does not mean that Google is already being evil. It may be a compromise but it is still consistent with Google’s mission. The censorship in the Chinese market is no longer new to Google also. Google also had practiced self-censorship in France, Germany and Poland to ban pro-Nazi information as it is