The background:
With over 105 million users online in early 2006, China’s Internet market was the second in size only to that of the United States, but it still represented only about 8% of the Chinese population. Though Google’s U.S.-based site, Google.com, had been available in China since the site’s inception in 1999, service was slow and unreliable due to extensive Chinese government censoring of international content. Google’s major U.S. competitors, Yahoo! and Microsoft MSN, had each entered the Chinese market as ISPs years earlier, agreeing to self-censor. In addition, escalating competition from Chinese search engine Baidu.com was quickly eroding Google. com’s Chinese market share: between 2002 and 2007, Baidu.com’s market share increased from a mere 3%1to a dominant 58%2

Also, during the same time there were cases of privacy breach in China by the companies which further made it difficult for Google to come to a decision. . In early 2006, just as Google was planning to launch Google.cn, it became known that Yahoo! China had turned over private user e-mail data to the Chinese government and that this had led to the ten-year, eight-year, and four-year prison sentences of Chinese cyber dissidents Shi Tao, Li Zhi, and Jiang Lijun. In addition, Microsoft had recently shut down the blog of famous Chinese political blogger Michael Anti (a penname for Zhao Jing) at the request of the Chinese government4. Clearly any decision made by Google to enter China would have to take into account concerns about user privacy and government surveillance

The criticism:

Google’s decision to self-censor Google.cn attracted significant ethical criticism at the time. The company’s motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” and prior to entering China, Google had successfully set itself apart from other technology giants, becoming a company trusted by millions of users to protect and store