Brinksmanship Continues In Google-China Row Over Censorship

According to The Financial Times, "Google has drawn up detailed plans for the closure of its Chinese search engine and is now '99.9 per cent' certain to go ahead [with the closure] as talks over censorship with the Chinese authorities have reached an apparent impasse, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking. In a hardening of positions on both sides, the Chinese government also on Friday threw down a direct public challenge to the US search company, with a warning that it was not prepared to compromise on internet censorship to stop Google leaving." "99.9 per cent" or not, both sides say they'd actually like Google to remain in China, but neither is willing to bend publicly on the question of censorship. If Google closes google.cn, as now seems likely, it could still maintain its R&D office in Beijing and its sales force, who sell ads on google.com targeted into China.

Comments

My humnle theory

[trifish]

What this is all about.

Recently quit a lot of independent security researchers and companies showed evidence that if you do any kind of business in China, you are BOUND to be hacked by "someone" from China. They also said that there is no defence against it (the China attacks will eventually always succeed).

Google was one of the victims of such attacks. They considered the facts. What do we get by doing business in China?

1) Small market share (the Chinese search engine Baidu dominates the search engine market in China)

2) Trojans on our internal networks.

Let's give up (because of 1 and 2). But let's do it in a way that wins us PR points. Let's do it in a way that makes us look good. Like, true fighters for freedom.

Let's tell them we're not going to obey their laws and regulations. We (Google) KNOW that they will not allow us to get away with that. But we don't care, because we've decided to leave anyway.

Re:Wow...

[grcumb]

Is Google actually delivering on their "Don't be evil" thing?

It's Sergei, mostly.

Can't find the reference right now, but there's a story out there in which it's posited that his childhood experience in the Soviet Union left him with an aversion to coercive state power. He allowed himself to be talked into going into China by Schmidt and Page, but when it became clear that China was using them to target human rights activists, Sergei baulked.

Having agreed at the outset to put limits on what they would put up with from China, Larry and Eric had no choice but to go along when Sergei insisted that they retaliate.