Google Won

The media continue to cover this story as an ongoing one, as it may pertain to Google's business, their competitors' opportunities and attempts at describing the Great Firewall of China and how it operates. But that is just news media noise.

As a futurist I try to provide readers with a "future look at today." Looking through the lens of the future, Google won. Historians in the 2020s will look back at the last 3 months of confrontational dancing between Google and the Chinese government and will see it as a directional signpost of two larger forces at play in the world.

One force is the ever-accelerating electronic connectedness of humanity. There are more than 4 billion people with cell phones. There are more that 1.25 billion people with access to computers. All of them connect to one another, and the expectation of users is always availability of information, communication and participation in a growing synaptic Neurosphere that is an alternative reality as real as the physical reality we grew up in.

In direct opposition to this force are the Chinese government's attempts at censoring, blocking and generally altering the ability of its citizens to plug into this Neurosphere. China has historically been inward-focused and has a long history of keeping the rest of the world out. They were, after all, the country that built the Great Wall. There is no bigger example of structural xenophobia in the history of the world.

When Google made its initial announcement in January regarding its ambivalence in continuing to accept Chinese censorship, I immediately knew that this could be an event of historical significance. The company most closely associated with the Internet in the world today was taking a stand that might well risk its ability to serve the largest national Internet market in the world. This position brought renewed and intense global attention to the often swept under the rug issue of the censorship policies, and to the seemingly well-documented hacking efforts of the Chinese government.

The Chinese government seemed to be caught off guard when its initial reactive response was met with even more questioning and attention. In the past 5-10 years China has sowed its nationalistic oats and forever altered the dynamics of the global economy. It is on the verge of becoming the second largest economy in the world. This has led China to be bold toward the world and resistant to accepting what the world has asked for in return. The Google confrontation was not about economic policy, nor did it come from a nation state. It was about two issues that are hard to defend: censorship and cyber attacks. There are few nations or multi-national corporations that will support censorship and cyber attacks. In the three months since the first Google announcement, there has been a noticeable shift in both the global perception of China and China's resultant response to the world. Everyone but China – and tentatively Microsoft – overtly or passively supported Google. China has since signed the Copenhagen accord, is open to supporting sanctions on Iran and seems to be more adaptable to the idea of devaluing its currency. This has all happened since the Google announcement in January that it might no longer play by China's rules.

Google might well lose revenue in the short term, but it gained the higher ground. They needed this at a time when a lot of constituencies were raising concerns about its growing power. This higher ground will serve Google well. If, for example, Microsoft continues to allow the Chinese government to dictate how the company can operate in China, it will be perceived through a filter that is altered. Google has shown that it is willing to lose revenue over the issues of censorship and cyber attacks.

Google might not have been viewing this episode with China through these macro flow filters. More likely it was feeling conflicted, did not like being attacked by a country that was also telling it what to do. And of course, there was the legacy of Sergey Brin's childhood memories of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union that weighed on the cofounder as he experienced a strong echo of it in his dealings with China. Whatever the internal dynamics were, Google won.

David Houle is a futurist, strategist and speaker. He has always been slightly ahead the curve. Houle spent more than 20 years in media and entertainment. Most recently, David is a featured contributor to Oprah.com. Check is out here www.oprah.com/davidhoule. David can be contacted at David@DavidHoule.com.

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