Google Stands By Its Principles

On good faith, Google seeks to honor its own “terms of agreement” that it offers to everyone who signs up for its e-mail service. And rightly so. It’s good business for the company to ensure and implement the right of privacy for its customers. It wins trust and company loyalty. But it also shows, on the part of Google, a serious respect for one’s intellectual property.

So that when the company discovered early this year that Chinese hackers had launched a sophisticated network attack against its e-mail service and corporate infrastructure, Google had threatened to pull out of China. Being targeted were the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and at least 20 other large companies.

In today’s WSJ article, it seems Google is poised to close its China site, even if that means losing 400 million Chinese users. In taking a stance against censorship and intellectual property violation, Google is telling the Chinese they should play by the rules.