Last October the Redmond Giant started a blackout campaign against piracy in China. Any computer that detected a pirated copy of Windows would simply turn the monitor black. At issue are millions of pirated copies of Windows, a potential playground for hackers — not to mention loss of revenue — since this software is not typically being updated with security patches.
Brilliant idea? It's hard to see how it could have been worse. Chinese businesses complained to the government, which told Microsoft to "rethink" its blackout campaign and respect consumer rights. Apparently in China you're still a consumer even if you buy from pirates. In the US, sympathy was also hard to find. The general consensus was Microsoft was simply paying the price of doing business in China. On the interweb, where discourse isn't usually very civil, even those few who stood up for Microsoft were shouted down as nothing less than defenders of pure and opportunistic evil.
Then three short months later Google gets attacked and threatens to pull out of China, generating an outcry from users both inside and outside China.
The lesson of this story — other than being popular is more important that just being good — is that the key to building international sympathy for a company is make any assault on it look like an attack on everyone.
Microsoft's mistake was making its software the focus of its campaign. The attack on Google is being portrayed as nothing less than an attack on human rights, privacy as well as an underhanded attempt by the government to renege on the deal that brought Google into the country in the first place. It's drama, baby.
That's how it's spun anyway, because the other way of looking at this is that China succumbed to the temptation of what it thought was low-hanging fruit. There are tons of data on possible dissidents — an internal security issue, they say — sitting on a computer somewhere.
Those computers go to the heart of the whole matter. The location of Google's data centres are company secrets. The deal that brought Google to China in 2005 provided for a censored version of its website (Google.cn) but allowed the company to keep its data centre outside the country, an issue that has previously resulted in Google.com being blocked in China.
Out of curiosity, I asked Joanne Kubba, the communications manager for Google here in the UAE, where my data (I use many of Google's products) is kept. I was told politely but firmly that information was closely guarded. I did learn that while we here in the UAE like to complain about sites like Orkut and Flickr being blocked, it's small potatoes compared to China. Kubba said that neither etisalat, du or the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority have ever approached the company and asked them to censor anything. True, we have the proxy instead, but that has more holes in it than Swiss cheese.
Those data centre computers are key. They contain all your emails, documents and a history of your online searches. They're the basis for Google's — as well as Microsoft's and Yahoo's — advertising revenues.
If that information is compromised, Google's advertising business goes down the pan. It's not surprising that following an attack, Google threatened to pull out.
Oddly enough, Microsoft has said it will not be pulling out. While Baidu, the dominant search engine in China, is expected to be the real winner in Google's withdrawal, Microsoft is also hoping to grab some of the estimated 25 per cent market share that will now be up for grabs. It's a chance for some revenge on their part, too. A number of security issues surrounding Internet Explorer 6 — the same issues that Microsoft was trying so hard to combat back in October — are being blamed for its role in the Chinese cyberattacks on Google, proving that not only is China a hard market to tame, its also abundantly rich in irony.
