Time for a Tech Foreign Policy?

Sometime soon, Google will announce that it's shutting down its China operations and then bask in the media moment. The story's a natural one pitting an idealistic company pledging not to do evil, against a communist cadre too scared of its own people to trust them to surf the Internet.

And then the technology industry will return to business as usual.

Already there are rumblings that Microsoft will gladly fill the vacuum left by Google's exit. The company press-savvy communications team doesn't put it so crassly. In fact, Microsoft's playing this as conservatively as it can. The only official comment from the company was a pointer to this anodyne blog post by CEO Steve Ballmer.

Read between the lines and it's clear that Ballmer isn't planning to take on China over freedom of expression. Not on his own, at least. Maybe he'd be bolder if someone had his back in Washington, but that's not the case. The Obama team has continued the Bush-era China policy and the State Department takes a hands-off policy in the face of Beijing's tightening limits on free expression. The upshot: In the absence of agreed upon rules of the road, U.S. technology are left to navigate for themselves.

All the more reason, then, to marvel at Google's decision to force the Chinese to the negotiating table. Google must have been truly fed up because this was the longest of long shots. In theory, I suppose a last-minute agreement still is within the realm of possibility. More likely, though, the Chinese will tell Eric Schmidt and the boys to Google the phrase, "exit, stage left." (A government spokesman in Beijing today said as much in response to reporters' questions.

In the absence of backing from Uncle Sam, U.S. technology companies operating in China will have to fend for themselves. And they have only so much influence. Some still hold out hope that this might serve as a turning point and that China will feel more pressure to improve its relationship with Silicon Valley. "If Google leaves China, I think the impact of that is China gets a black eye," Stanford's Haim Mendelson, a professor of electronic business at the Stanford Graduate School of Business told the San Francisco Chronicle. "People will remember what happened to Google."

They will remember. And they'll remember that the apparatchiks who run China aren't terribly afraid of staring down technology geeks from California.