internet - Google CEO defends censorship as 'less evil'

Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, used questions asked at a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos to repeat the company's defense for offering a censored search engine in China, next to its uncensored global service, writes MacWorld.

“We concluded that although we weren’t wild about the restrictions, it was even worse to not try to serve those users at all,” Schmidt said. “We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil,” he said, referring to the company’s famous “don’t be evil” creed.

Still, the jury is out, as only few internet users complained about the current quality of Google in China, the second most popular search engine in the country. Financial reasons cannot offer an explanation, writes Billsdue, since the expected returns from China would be close to microscopic.