Google’s Days in China Are Numbered

Whether you believe that Google’s latest decision to stop censoring content in China is an altruistic (if somewhat belated) attempt to do the right thing or merely a business ploy to get out of China gracefully (seeing as it has little chance of beating China’s #1 search engine Baidu), one thing’s for certain.

Things are getting a little hairy for Google in China.

Here’s the breakdown of events as they unfolded:

• mid-December 2009 – Google’s corporate infrastructure in China is hacked in a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack.” According to Google, this hacking also affected twenty other companies (reportedly including Yahoo!) and were meant to extract data on Chinese human rights activists. The Gmail account information of two activists are accessed, but not the emails themselves.
• January 12th, 2010 – Google announces on their official blog: “we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.“
• January 13th, 2010 – Chinese citizens hold an informal memorial mourning the imminent loss of Google.
• January 14th, 2010 – The Chinese Government puts IMDB.com on its list of inaccessible sites.
• January 14th, 2010 – China indirectly responds to Google by publicly defending its right to censor information and stating that companies in China must abide by China’s laws.
• January 14th, 2010 – Employees at Google China are given “holiday leave” and ” no longer have access to company systems.”

It seems that it’s only a matter of time before Google.cn is swept under the rug.

Read More {Bloomberg}

Read More {Google Blog}

Read More {Matador Network}

Read More {TechCrunch}