In the case of China, Google complied with country law to allow initial entry and the positioning of hardware and resources within China. In the case of Brazil, Google doesn't have infrastructure (related to Orkut) in the country. Additionally, Orkut isn't completely a Google project (to my knowledge it was originally a product of one of their Engineers not really intended to be a part of the Google franchise). Brazil is requesting user data - which Google has promised to keep private. By handing the data over to Brazil, they would potentially be violating their user agreement and obligations to users in the United States. Remember, Google's policy is "Do No Evil". If they start releasing client information it provides a standard basis from which to request more. They resisted the U.S. Governments requests for search data related to child porn - and a fishing expedition. Now they're resisting Brazil's fishing expedition. If you notice, when Brazil has made specific requests, Google has complied with information.

Do No Evil went out the window concomitant with the IPO.

About 33 cents a person - 61 divided by 186 (you're dealing with millions in both cases, so you can drop the trailing zeros) the answer is roughly 0.33, expressed in dollars.

The important number however, would not be the number of Brazillian citizens, but the number of Brazillian Orkut users.

Nah, I think the Brazilian government is suing on behalf of all Brazilians, since all 186M ostensibly had their quality of life degraded by pornographers/criminals who use Orkut to spread their wares. Ask me though, I blame mikeinbrazil.com.

They're requiring the Brazilian government to address the request correctly before they will comply... "Do No Evil Unless Forced To Do So With Properly Filed Paperwork"... I agree with them completely... I think to do anything else would be to cheapen the value of what they hold, and encourage more fishing from less benevolent governments.

That is right, the most important issue forGoodle is not to create a precedent or at least not to make each of the consecutive precedents easier (US, China, Brazil, who's next?)

It´s a very simple viewpoint, dear author. While unitedstates citizens have their private life (un?)legally opened to theirs government intelligence services, Brazilians are kindly trying to deal with an ambiguous corporative privacy policy wich is connivente with criminal content. Some content hosted by Orkut are criminal, abusive and obscene, even so acessible to any child that join such relationship network. Google and Mr. Orkut must to do more than pay some money, but this i$ the language that business man can understand and dialogue about. US´s companies have liabilities, but can't to accomplish with Brazilian values. Some respect could to be a starting point.

Palhaço

Com orgulho.

sprechen sie what?

I´m sorry for speaking another language. You are doing a great work!

Google is treating them the exact same way they treat all government... file your paperwork correctly, Google will decide to cooperate or use legal action to block... if they lose or decide to cooperate they comply completely. The involvement of children makes this an emotionally charged issue but to me (and yes I have children :) ) the more important issue is precedent... how to deal with information transactions. We are in the Information Age and data is the new currency... it needs to be treated with the same care as personal property. The level of government control over information like Google's must be very carefully controlled up to and including whether the paperwork is filed correctly. It seems to me Google is paying respect to the government of Brazil and treating it exactly like China and the United States. :)

sorry, but I was not talking only about coporative respect. respectless are the infantile calculations that moved this comments. (it seems like issues are beeing solved by legal procedure, as shows us recent highlights.)

Google said it will divulge a "small and narrow" amount of data to Brazilian authorities after the government...

This is another case where Google *could* choose to just play hard-ball with a foreign government. There are certainly valid reasons they might choose not to, but one option would be to "offer" to cut Brazil out of the Google picture entirely -- no indexing of sites hosted in Brazil, no indexing of sites with a .br domain, no access to any Google service from systems located within Brazil, etc. Google could make itself and Brazil non-entities to each other, which would certainly have a financial impact in both directions, but probably not equally. Would the citizens -- and businesses -- in Brazil be pleased with that result, or would they pressure their government to back off once they realized that Google was standing firm? Whether we like it or not (and many do not), the reality of today's world is that some corporations are much more wealthy and powerful than many national governments, and some "core services" businesses maintain a historically-peculiar leverage with respect to those governments. Whether those corporations choose to flex that power or not is a complex issue, but being "pushed into a corner" might eventually elicit such a response, whether from Google or some other entity.

The option that you mentioned (to cut .br of the Google) is a reasonable, feasible and desirable corporative position, or are you who are speculating?