The latest post on the official Google blog mentions infiltration attacks to their corporate infrastructure, mainly the accessing of Chinese Human Rights activists’ Gmail accounts by third parties. As a result, Google is planning to review their business operations in China.
First, I believe there’s much more to this than what they let appear on that post. They’re just playing nice.
Then, this
…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.
could mean that they likely pull out of China all together, if things didn’t work out.
My personal take is that they won’t [BS detector is going haywire]. The Chinese online market is huge and only in its baby steps; they can’t afford to leave. I believe Google is using the publicity of this event to further negotiate their place within China as well as try to get the Chinese government to ease up on their favoritism towards Baidu, among other things. The blog post is carefully worded as to not directly point the finger to the Chinese government, but hey, who are we kidding.
Big G doesn’t want to lose. They’re frustrated but won’t do the ebay thing. They know they can’t go head to head with the Chinese to get what they want, so they’ll be using this as a bargaining chip on the table over the next few weeks. Google is playing sneaky and they will eventually get what they want. If they don’t, I’ll eat my hat.
All this, in addition to the recent decision by CCNIC to not accept .cn domain registrations except from registered businesses within China [ including businesses outside of China but with delays ] due to recent government regulations, does not paint a rosy picture about China’s business environment, at least for now.
Baidu, ccnic, China, Google
