Google and China: Google's plan to withdraw from China may be as much about poor business prospects as ethics
Posted in: Censorship at 14/01/2010 00:17
"We're in this for the long haul", wrote a Google executive four years ago when the internet giant launched a self-censored version of its search engine for China. Now Google says it might have to pull out of the country because of alleged attacks by hackers in China on its e-mail service and a tightening of restrictions on free speech online.
Google's "new approach to China", as the firm's chief legal officer, David Drummond, called it in an official blog posting on Tuesday January 12th, will infuriate the government in Beijing. Official sensitivity to foreign complaints about internet controls in China was evident in November during a visit by President Barack Obama. His obliquely worded criticism of online censorship was itself expunged from official media reports. If the firm were to quit China, Google would be the first big foreign company to do so while citing concerns about freedom of speech.
http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15267915
Google Would Abandon a Lucrative Market
Google threatened on Tuesday to pull out of China after it learned of immense security attacks and attempts to gain access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents and human rights activists.
In addition, the 20 or so other companies that may also have been attacked, many of them American, are now in the difficult position of deciding whether to follow Google, whose business in China is small. While it has several hundred employees in China, Google lags far behind the home-grown search engine Baidu.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/technology/companies/13hacker.html
Google's Threat Echoed Everywhere, Except China
Google's declaration that it would stop cooperating with Chinese Internet censorship and consider shutting down its operations in the country ricocheted around the world Wednesday. But in China itself, the news was heavily censored.
Some big Chinese news portals initially carried a short dispatch on Google's announcement, but that account soon tumbled from the headlines, and later reports omitted Google's references to "free speech" and "surveillance."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/world/asia/14beijing.html
Google Warns of China Exit Over Hacking
Google said it may leave China after an investigation found the company had been hit with major cyber attacks it believes originated from the country - a move that would amount to a high-profile rebuke of China by a major US firm.
The attack targeted as many as 34 different companies or other entities, according to two people familiar with the investigation, which has been under way for weeks.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126333757451026659.html
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/news/google-to-build-great-wall-in-wake-of-cyber-attack/story-e6frg90x-1225818914737
Google Threat Jolts Chinese Internet Industry
Google Inc.'s threat to walk away from China sent shockwaves through the country's fast-growing Internet industry Wednesday, with users, executives and analysts trying to gauge the potential fallout.
The U.S. search giant's announcement that it will stop censoring its Chinese search site, and may withdraw from the country altogether, triggered an outpouring of concern, and some anger, among Chinese Internet users. Students and others gathered at Google's offices in Beijing and Shanghai Wednesday with flowers in an emotional show of support for the company, which analysts say has an audience of more than 40 million loyal users in China.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704362004575000440265987982.html
Google Gets On the Right Side of History: The Chinese people will learn who their real friends are by Rebecca MacKinnon
One night in the mid-1990s when I was working as a journalist in Beijing, I went out to dinner with some Chinese friends. I had just finished reading a book called "The File" by the British historian Timothy Garton-Ash. It's about what happened in East Berlin after the Berlin Wall came down and everybody could see the files that the Stasi had been keeping all those years. People discovered who had been ratting on whom -- in some cases neighbors and co-workers, but also lovers, spouses and even children. After I described the book to my Chinese dinner companions -- a hip and artsy intellectual crowd -- one friend declared: "Some day the same thing will happen in China, then I'll know who my real friends are."
The table went silent.
China today is very different from Soviet-era Eastern Europe. It's unlikely that its current political system -- or its system for blocking foreign Web sites known widely as the "great firewall" -- will crumble like the Berlin Wall any time soon. Both are supported and enabled by the current geopolitical, commercial and investment climate in ways that Soviet-era Eastern Europe and the Iron Curtain never were.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704362004575000442815795122.html
U.S., Google and China square off over Internet
Google's threat to quit China over censorship and hacking intensified Sino-U.S. frictions on Wednesday as Washington said it had serious concerns and demanded an explanation from Beijing.
China has not made any significant comment since Google, the world's top search engine, said it will not abide by censorship and may shut its Chinese-language google.cn website because of attacks from China on human rights activists using its Gmail service and on dozens of companies, including Adobe Systems.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE60B5S620100113
http://in.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idINIndia-45344620100113
How will Microsoft, Yahoo respond to Google's China challenge?
Google's move to challenge Chinese censorship demands and threaten to pull its business from the country could pressure search rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo to follow suit.
Analysts said Google should generate positive reviews from its challenge to the Chinese government, which could prove a problem for rivals that still censor search results for users in the country.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9144398/How_will_Microsoft_Yahoo_respond_to_Google_s_China_challenge_
China faces backlash from 'netizens' if Google leaves
Google's threat to shut down its Chinese Web site and offices over cyber-attacks and censorship puts the government here in the awkward position of choosing between its devotion to restricting information and the possible ire of the roughly 80 million Chinese who use the search engine.
Few political and Internet analysts doubt that China's government will stick to its tough stance and reject Google's proposal to stop censoring its Web site.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/13/AR2010011301168.html
Google threatens to log off from China over hacking attempts
Google is fed up with the government of the People's Republic of China and may walk away from the entire country if things don't improve.
Google laid out its cards in a quietly angry blog post yesterday afternoon titled "A new approach to China." The post related how the Web-search giant had first detected hacking attempts from China against its own computers and those of other large companies, then found evidence that these attacks were intended to hack into Gmail accounts used by advocates -- in China and elsewhere -- of human rights in the communist-ruled country.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/01/google_threatens_to_log_off_fr.html
China's internet crackdown forced Google retreat
Google's retreat from China comes amid an intensifying crackdown on the country's internet that has seen websites blocked, an entire region closed down and self-censorship become increasingly widespread.
In the past 12 months the Great Fire Wall - China's system of restricting foreign content - has been raised to keep out Twitter and Facebook. Many other sites, such as YouTube, were already blocked.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/13/google-retreat-china-crackdown-censorship
China's internet crackdown forced Google retreat
Google's retreat from China comes amid an intensifying crackdown on the country's internet that has seen websites blocked, an entire region closed down and self-censorship become increasingly widespread.
In the past 12 months the Great Fire Wall - China's system of restricting foreign content - has been raised to keep out Twitter and Facebook. Many other sites, such as YouTube, were already blocked.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/13/google-retreat-china-crackdown-censorship