Google co-founder Sergey Brin said on Friday he is hoping the Internet powerhouse will find a way to operate in China without censoring Web search results.
“I’m optimistic,” Brin said during an on-stage chat at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California. “I want to find a way to really work within the Chinese system and drive more information.
“A lot of people think I’m naive, and that may be true, but I wouldn’t have started a search engine if I wasn’t naive,” he said smiling.
Brin declined to place odds on the chances of Google working out a compromise that would allow unfettered online searches in China, saying only that while it wasn’t likely to happen now it might “in a year or two.”
He defended Google’s decision to launch a filtered search engine in China in 2006, saying the company’s presence in that market “made a big difference but things started going downhill after the Olympics” there.
The situation “took a turn for the worse” with Web services such as YouTube being blocked, Brin said.
Google vowed a month ago to stop bowing to Internet censors in China in the wake of sophisticated cyberattacks aimed at the US firm’s source code and Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world.
Google continues to filter searches as per Chinese law while trying to negotiate a compromise with officials there.
“We intend to stop censoring,” Brin said. “We don’t want to run a service that is politically censored.”
Google’s investigation showed similar attacks on dozens of other companies, said Brin, who declined to point a finger at the Chinese government.
“It turns out a number of companies were aware of attacks on their systems and didn’t come forward with respect to these security issues,” he said. “If more companies were to come forward with respect to these security issues I think we would all be safer.”
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