Google both pursued and abandoned China under Larry Page and Sergey Brin

A decade after leaving China, Google is losing its "moral compass" Sergey Brin, but CEO Sundar Pichai takes a more practical approach to China

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Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are stepping down, and Sundar Pichai will be the CEO of both Google and parent company Alphabet. (Picture: AP)

Xinmei Shen

Published: 9:19pm, 4 Dec 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Google has a complex history with China. Over the past 20 years, the company has made compromises to operate in China, exited the country and then planned a return that was later nixed.

Google’s back and forth on China can’t be attributed to any one leader. But the reason Google currently doesn’t operate in China can be largely traced back to Alphabet President Sergey Brin, who made a surprise announcement yesterday with Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page that they’re stepping down from their current roles at the company.

The first Chinese version of Google.com appeared in 2000, two years after the company was founded. While China’s Great Firewall wouldn’t be up and running for another three years, the Chinese government’s control of the internet was already causing issues for Google, which was slow and unstable for Chinese internet users.

The story of China’s Great Firewall, the world’s most sophisticated censorship system

After being repeatedly blocked in the country, Google launched Google.cn in 2006 as a search engine just for China that would censor results for sensitive topics like Falun Gong and the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. Images comparing Google results for Tiananmen Square inside and outside China circulated online. Google.cn also displayed labels to inform users when search results were censored.

That year, Sergey Brin told the New York Times that entering China was about getting information to people rather than a business decision, explaining this as the reason for eventually compromising on censorship. But four years later, Brin changed his stance.