Business & Professional Ethics 7th Edition by Leonard Brooks,Paul Dunn

Exercise 61

Google is the world's largest search engine. In 2009, it had approximately 400 million web users, of which 200 million are located in the United States. Its global revenue from advertising amounted to $23.6 billion. China is the world's third-largest economy. China has a potential 384 million Internet users and advertising revenue from China is estimated to be $15 to $20 billion annually. In 2006, Google began operations in China as Google.cn. Part of the agreement with the Chinese government was that the Google.cn search engine would censor information from topics that had been banned by the Chinese government.
In January 2010, Google threatened to pull out of China after it claimed that Google and some twenty other large companies had been subjected, in December 2009, to "a highly sophisticated and targeted attack" designed to steal software codes. The alleged purpose of the attack was so that the Chinese government could break into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Although the attack was unsuccessful, Google decided it should review its operations in China. "We have decided that 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."
Three months later, in March 2010, Google closed Google.cn and began directing its Chinese customers to a search engine in Hong Kong, Google.com.hk. Hong Kong is a special administrative region and so the Google.com.hk search engine is not subject to Chinese government censorship. The Chinese government complained that this was a violation of the written promise Google had made when it began operations in China in 2006.
The license for Google to operate in China was up for renewal on June 30, 2010. Without the license "Google would effectively go dark in China." Then, in July, a compromise was reached. The Chinese government renewed Google's license to operate in China, and Google said that it would not automatically redirect its Chinese users to the uncensored Hong Kong site. Instead, users would go to a landing page on Google.cn that is linked to Google.com.hk. In other words, users would have to double-click in order to get to the Hong Kong site. This solution saved face. Google agreed to obey Chinese laws, while at the same time, by providing access to the Hong Kong site, the company could say that it was maintaining its anticensorship policies. "As a company we aspire to make information available to users everywhere, including China. It's why we have worked so hard to keep Google.cn alive, as well as to continue our research and development work in China. This new approach is consistent with our commitment not to self censor [sic] and, we believe, with local law." After the announcement that Google's Chinese license had been renewed, the company's stock rose 2.8 percent.
After the December 2009 attack, Google enhanced the security for all of its users. Does Google have any additional ethical responsibility to human rights activists to provide them with even more sophisticated architectural and infrastructure improvements so that their specific Gmail accounts cannot be compromised?