In The Plex

by Steve Levy

  The question the executives discussed was the same one that had been argued five years earlier: what’s the right thing to do in China? Google had originally hoped that the Chinese would appreciate its compromise and tacitly tolerate Google’s quiet pressure to relax the filtering. Instead it was the opposite. And now Google was under attack. Was this a short-term problem, or should Google acknowledge the setback and press on? In 2006, Eric Schmidt had promised five thousand years of patience. Would Google now give up after only five? As with the previous argument, the outcome would rely less on business considerations than moral ones, though no one could say how much the prospect of profits affected the views of those who argued for sticking it out. Google didn’t reach out to the Chinese government to discuss the consequences. Nor did Google consult with its former head of its China operation.

  Sergey Brin took the incident personally. Insiders observed that he was much less perturbed by the theft of Google’s intellectual property than the fact that his company had unwittingly been a tool used to identify and silence critics of a repressive government. In interviews afterwards, he acknowledged that his personal history had shaped his response. He was also incensed to learn that other American companies had been similarly compromised yet had chosen to bury the incidents. He argued that Google should expose those companies, but others, including Google’s lawyers, discouraged him. Brin focused his considerable computer science talents on the minutiae of security: it was the cofounder himself who gave briefings to the communications staff to explain what had happened.

  Brin wanted the incident to be the catalyst to the action that he and others had been urging since 2008: Google should stop censoring. He was passionate in his insistence. He had support from some executives who had soured on China over the past ten months—but not all. Notably, Eric Schmidt was not convinced. But Brin was adamant: Google was under attack by the forces of evil, and if his fellow executives did not see things his way, they were supporting evil. (I’d heard from a knowledgeable but not firsthand source that Brin threatened to quit if Google did not change its policy. Brin, through a spokesperson, says he didn’t recall saying that, and that the company was so much in his blood and DNA, it was unlikely that he expressed that intention. He did acknowledge that during the many hours of debate, he presented his case with the utmost passion.) As the days went on, and the security news looked worse—now it appeared that Google was one of more than forty companies targeted in the hack, an indication that the Chinese harbored the worst intentions toward U.S. high-tech businesses—Brin’s point of view eventually prevailed. On January 10, 2010, Google’s top executives reached a decision. Larry Page had joined Brin in deciding to end Google’s experiment in censorship; the outvoted Schmidt accepted the decision. (Insiders would later say that the setback had long-lasting implications for Schmidt’s relationship with the founders, but from the very start of his time at Google, Schmidt had understood that his word on crucial company matters was not final.) In any case, the company decided that it would no longer carry out censorship for the Chinese government on its .cn search engine. The consequences of that decision would be up to the Chinese government.

  “The security incident, because of its political nature, just caused us to say ‘Enough’s enough,’” says Drummond.

  The next day Drummond wrote a blog item explaining Google’s decision. It was called “A New Approach to China.” He outlined the nature of the attack on Google and explained that it had implications far beyond a security breach; it hit the heart of a global debate about free speech. Then he dropped Google’s bombshell:

  These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered—combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web—have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

  On January 12, Google published the Drummond essay on its blog. The news spread through Mountain View like an earthquake. Meetings all over the campus came to a dead stop as people looked at their laptops and read how Google was no longer doing the dirty work of the Chinese dictatorship. “I think a whole generation of Googlers will remember exactly where they were when that blog item appeared,” says one product manager, Rick Klau.

  For Google’s employees in China, the day was also unforgettable. Not one of them had been alerted to the move ahead of time. Drummond posted his announcement at 6 a.m. Beijing time, and many of the Googlers in Beijing and Shanghai first heard about it when frantic colleagues wakened them. Employees filed into the office in a state of shock. That afternoon Google told all the employees to leave and gave them tickets to see Avatar. The next day everyone gathered in the café for a teleconference with Brin and other executives, who did their best to explain Google’s actions. It was a tough sell. At one point, Government Relations head Julie Zhu delivered an emotional objection to the actions of her employers, overseas generals who seemed to have abandoned the soldiers in the theater of war. You should not have given up, she argued. You should have kept fighting. Others, including Xuemei Gu, challenged Sergey on the issue as well. Over the next few days, dozens of Googlers crossed the street to Kai-Fu Lee’s new offices to get advice from their former leader. A few would choose to work for him.

  Drummond’s posting had said that Google was waiting to see if China would allow it to run an uncensored search engine from inside the country, but of course the government would never allow that. The Chinese government responded by rebuking Google for what it called false accusations of government complicity in the cybercrimes. After a few weeks, Google announced that it would shutter the Google.cn site and redirect traffic to its service in Hong Kong, at Google.hk. Because of Hong Kong’s history as a free zone, China did not demand that Internet sites there follow the same censorship regime as on the mainland.

  But as Google awaited the renewal of its business license in June, China signaled that the Hong Kong arrangement was unsatisfactory. Google changed its landing page so that search users would no longer be taken directly to the .hk site but could click on a link to it. From there, Google would deliver uncensored search. It would be slow, and sometimes China would block the site. The government could, and did, block users from visiting forbidden sites. But at least it would be the Chinese government, not Google, doing the censoring. Google would continue to offer other services, such as music and maps, from China. China renewed the license and implicitly approved the plan. Google was still alive in China. But it had no illusions about the arrangement. “I want to make this clear,” Eric Schmidt told reporters in summer 2010. “China has the absolute ability to shut us down, and we wouldn’t have an appeals process.”

  Meanwhile, Google’s market share in China began a steady erosion. “We are certainly benefiting from it,” said Baidu CEO Robin Li in a conference call in April 2010 that announced the biggest profits in its history.

  Kai-Fu Lee still believed that the balance he had maintained between censorship and transparency had been the right one, and he was proud that Google could redraw the line that the government had set down—and survive. He also believed that Google should have remained on its course, even after the security breach. “Had I been there and had they consulted me, I would’ve said certain things which may or may not have made any difference,” he says. “Most Chinese people don’t care. I think some felt, ‘This is a company that didn’t follow the laws, so they should get out of here.’ Others felt, ‘Oh, no, don’t leave for this.’ It’s all over the place. But I do think most people think it was not good for the user.”

  Lee said if you look at China’s behavior over a long horizon—twenty or thirty years—it’s clear that the trend
was toward more openness. The incidents that led to Google’s retreat were “a perturbation” in this movement, mainly because the current Chinese leaders had reached their limits. “The next generation will come up in less than two years,” he says. “They’re younger, more progressive, many American-trained, and many have worked in businesses and run banks—they’re going to be more open.”

  But the government of China saw things differently. As the Google experiment ended, its State Council Information Office reported to its leadership that it had essentially overcome the threatening prospect of openness once promised by the Internet—and Google. “In the past a lot of officials worried that the web could not be controlled,” someone familiar with the report told The New York Times. “But through the Google incident and other increased controls and surveillance … they reached a conclusion: the web is fundamentally controllable.”

  In the wake of the attack from China, Heather Adkins and her security team reset their practices and policies. The work experience of Google engineers all over the world was affected as Google went into what it called “corp lockdown.” The golden balance that Google security had strived for—bulletproof protection with minimal disruption to a natural work flow—was gone. For instance, to get into MOMA from a remote location, you had to put in the usual passwords as well as an additional onetime password that was sent to your mobile phone. Getting access to the data centers became a painstaking process.

  Googlers accepted the new restrictions with little outcry. The China break-in provided them with indisputable data to justify increased safeguards for Google’s jewels. There was a psychological justice to the inconvenience as well. Call it a penance for doing evil in China.

  PART SEVEN

  GOOGLE.GOV

  Is What’s Good for Google Good for Government—or the Public?

  1

  “I was probably the only computer science degree in the whole campaign.”

  On November 14, 2007, Barack Obama came to Google.

  It was not his first trip. In the summer of 2004, as an Illinois state legislator running for the U.S. Senate, Obama had toured Silicon Valley. A Mountain View drop-in was a highlight, so much so that he wrote about the experience in his book The Audacity of Hope. David Drummond had given the recent star of the Democratic National Convention a tour (“the main building … felt more like a college student center than an office,” observed the guest) and introduced him at a TGIF. Obama discussed Gmail and voice search with Larry Page, who led him to an exhibit Google often showed its visitors: a flat-panel display with a representation of the globe, with points of light indicating Google search activity in real time. In his book, Obama described the reverie this animation inspired:

  The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries between men—nationality, race, wealth—were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexican department store were drawn into a single, thrumming conversation, time and space giving way to a world spun entirely of light.

  Obama’s vision, sounding as if it were evoked from a lava-lamp haze, was eerily similar to that of Page and Brin, in their claims of how Google would ride on the shoulders of the Internet to make the world a better, more egalitarian, more empowering place.

  During the next presidential election cycle, Google hosted a series of candidate appearances. The Googleplex had become one of the mandatory stops on the political pilgrimage, almost a geek version of the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner for Democrats or the Reagan Day feast for the GOP. One by one, POTUS hopefuls came to Charlie’s Café, each introduced by an executive sympathetic to his or her cause. First would come a speech, then a fireside chat–style interview with the sponsoring Googler. Next would come a usually spirited Q and A. Soon afterward, Google would upload a video of the event to YouTube.

  By late 2007, Barack Obama already had an impressive Google following. Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s policy chief, was advising the senator on tech issues. The product manager for Blogger, Rick Klau, had lived in Illinois and had operated Obama’s blog when the politician ran for the Senate (he’d even let Obama use his house for a fund-raiser). Eric Schmidt was the candidate’s official host. Charlie’s was so packed that they had to lock down Building 40 and direct latecomers to web feeds elsewhere on campus.

  The most memorable moment came during the Q and A. “What,” asked a Googler to the politician, “is the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers?”

  It was a hard-core programming question an engineer might be asked in a job interview at Google. But the candidate squinched up his face in concentration, as if racing through various programming alternatives. “Well,” he finally said, “I think the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go.”

  The crowd erupted in appreciative laughter. The exchange had obviously been staged. Indeed, Andrew McLaughlin had briefed the candidate. And before the session, Schmidt had prepped him on how he might answer such a question. “So he was not completely surprised,” says Schmidt.

  (Tellingly, Google’s research head, Peter Norvig, had written a paper in 2004 that developed a point that Schmidt made at the candidates’ Google sessions—that the process of choosing a president should be more like Google’s hiring procedure. Using that yardstick, he concluded that “Bush would not get past the initial phone screen,” while Google might well have hired Kerry. In 2008, he wrote an addendum claiming that a job recruiter for the nation’s CEO would do best with Obama.)

  Google was Obama territory, and vice versa. With its focus on speed, scale, and above all data, Google had identified and exploited the key ingredients for thinking and thriving in the Internet era. Barack Obama seemed to have integrated those concepts in his own approach to problem solving. Naturally, Googlers were excited to see what would happen when their successful methods were applied to Washington, D.C. They were optimistic that the Google worldview could prevail outside the Mountain View bubble.

  At Charlie’s that day, Obama had explained his approach to health care. He would invite everybody to sit at the table, including special interests (“They’ll get to sit at the table, they just won’t get to buy every seat”). It would all be done publicly, shown on C-SPAN, and streamed over the net. If those special interests engaged in fearmongering and misinformation, the Obama counterpunch would be something Googlers could relate to: data. If the drug companies insisted that their prices had to remain high because of R&D costs, he said, “We’ll present data.” If the opposition ran misleading commercials like the one of Harry and Louise, Obama would counter with his own commercials, loaded with the facts. He’d run them on YouTube! “We’ll present data and facts that make it more difficult to favor the special interests,” he said. Provided with correct information, he said, the American people will always make good decisions.

  “I’m looking forward to doing that because I’m a big believer in reason and fact and science and evidence and feedback [he was ticking off each of these key beliefs on his fingers], everything that allows you to do what you do, that’s what we should be doing in our government,” said Obama to the raptly attentive Googlers. He said he wanted innovators and scientists and engineers like the people at Google helping him to make policy. “Based on facts! Based on reason!”

  He thought like a Googler.

  Google did not officially support a candidate in 2008. But it did play a major role in the election season as a nonaffiliated technology supplier to the campaigns. YouTube became the communications platform of choice—each party had a debate where citizens could use the service to post questions to the candidate. Google’s search engine was a font of quick information on candidates and issues. And candidates made significant political advertising buys based on search keywords. (You could tell whose staff was savviest by seeing whose ads appeared when you did a se
arch for their opponents.)

  Sergey Brin ordered up a Google Elections Team to work with campaigns and enable citizen access through Google products. “We were helping support YouTube, we were helping support AdWords, we were helping on Google Maps,” says Katie Stanton, the biz-dev person leading the team. Around the time the team was forming, Rick Klau was discussing with a friend on the Obama campaign how the close race for the Democratic nomination with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton might be decided by which candidate won the “superdelegates.” (Those were the unpledged nominating delegates whose votes were up for grabs.) But there was no good way to track them. Klau secured the superdelegates.org web domain name and used Google tools to set up a wiki-style website. He identified all 796 superdelegates, got their geocoordinates, and mashed up the database with Google Maps so one could visualize the geographical breakdown of Obama’s superdelegates and Clinton’s. Klau did this on his own, but after the site was featured on CNN, Google moved him full-time to the Elections Team.

  Google had a presence at both party conventions, led by Megan Smith, Stanton’s boss. Google executives attended and were treated like dignitaries. “They were able to not just get handshakes but sit down and get good time, ask questions,” says Klau. This happened not just at the Democratic confab in Denver, but also at the GOP convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. From the moment they hit the hotel, Stanton and Smith saw how eager politicians were to snuggle up to Google. Stanton and Smith began talking to eBay CEO and political hopeful Meg Whitman, went to a Cindy McCain luncheon, and met former New York senator Alfonse D’Amato. (Stanton cajoled D’Amato to call up her dad, who was a big fan. “Herbie?” said the former senator when he reached Stanton’s father. “I’m with your hot daughter!”) Then it was time to attend a huge party that Google cohosted with Vanity Fair. At 1 a.m., Stanton spotted Megan Smith hanging out with the Palin family. Smith, who before Google had once been CEO of Planet Out, the world’s biggest gay media site, was an equal-opportunity schmoozer.