Google, the virtuous? Google, the warrior?

At the Thousand Oaks conference panel on Social responsibility of Mass Media, there was an interesting discussion about government regulation. A renowned media scholar brought up the “Google exit from China” as an example of how State regulation can indeed have dire consequences for its own population. This professor regurgitated what most media agencies have been propounding on this issue - Google left China after supposed multiple clashes with the Chinese government regarding censorship of its search engine. The Chinese people lost out and ethics won apparently:

Drummond, the Senior VP, corporate development and chief legal officer of Google announced the following:

We had uncovered evidence to suggest that the Gmail accounts of dozens of human rights activists connected with China were being routinely accessed by third parties, most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on their computers. We also made clear that these attacks and the surveillance they uncovered—combined with attempts over the last year to further limit free speech on the web in China including the persistent blocking of websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs and Blogger—had led us to conclude that we could no longer continue censoring our results on Google.cn.

This professor is actually in good company: CNN, Huffington Post, to the Hindustan Times, news media transnationally seem to frame this story through one primary lens: the high price China paid due to its State regulation on information. There is much lament on what will happen to the Chinese citizens, on the tremendous loss for China in access to a quality search engine like Google and how after all, there is such a thing as corporate ethics.

Yet, few media stories mention Baidu in the same article as Google’s exit, even in the passing. Strange I must say, given that this home-grown Search engine company has the largest market share in China and is growing, from 64% to possibly 79% and of course, will benefit with Google’s departure. In fact, Google’s share since 2005 has dropped from 33% to 20% . There are a number of reasons for that as I learnt recently from my own students at Erasmus University: according to Jonas, Sonja and Disi, it's possibly due to a host of reasons including user patriotism, State marketing of Baidu, its user-prefered mp3 music sharing device to the fact that most users are less interested in being political online and more interested in social and entertainment oriented activity.

Regardless of why Google has lagged behind so astoundingly in such a hot future market of online consumers, I am more interested in how media across board has gone along with the portraying of Google’s exit strategy as that of corporate ethics. The media has been complicit in simulating a dignified exit for this corporate giant who has failed in its effort at penetrating this Chinese market. In the guise of virtue, this defeated warrior exits, having media lend a halo to this act.