An Interview with David Drummond of Google

From James Fallows in The Atlantic:

Just now I spoke on the phone with David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer and author of yesterday’s Official Google Blog post about the company’s new policies in China.

Highlights from the discussion below. I was typing this down in real time, so it may be 98 rather than 100 percent faithful to what he actually said. The entire discussion was on the record.

I began by asking what was non-obvious about the development — an aspect of the story known on the inside that had not been captured in the public reports:

It may not be quite obvious that this is not really a “shutdown” of either our operations in China or of our mainland China-focused web site. We have moved the physical location of it [to Hong Kong], and the virtual location. But the experience we are trying to offer to Chinese users is like the one on Google.cn, but done without the censorship on our part.

For more…