Google stands up to China

Posted by Leah McBride Mensching on January 14, 2010 at 12:59 PM

Google announced on Tuesday it is rethinking how it does business in China, following the breach of Gmail accounts belonging to Chinese human rights activists. The "highly sophisticated" cyber attacks originated from within China.

"These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered - combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web - have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided 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. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China," David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer of Google stated in a Google blog post.

China has responded to the announcement saying it welcomes Internet companies as long as they obey laws by censoring their content, Bloomberg reported today.

"The Chinese government may want to give Google's high-profile move the cold shoulder," Huang Jing, a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, told Bloomberg. Because Google has announced "that Google.cn can no longer put up with Beijing's censorship - the CCP leaders are afraid that it could set a dangerous political precedent should they compromise on this one."

Google launched in China in 2006 after agreeing it would censor search results as long as it could state on the search results page that results had been censored, "betting that a strategy of engagement would encourage China to open up and that providing Chinese users with some results was better than nothing," Wired reported today.

Yahoo, meanwhile, has not said if it had been attacked, or whether it is reviewing its Chinese operations, according to Wired. However, the search engine has came under fire in the past for turning over e-mails of democracy activist Wang Xiaoning to the Chinese government and turning over information about Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who e-mailed the government's instructions to journalists for the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Microsoft has said it will not comment on its operations in China, other than to say there is "no indication that any of our mail properties have been compromised," Wired reported.

Employees at Google China's Shanghai offices have been given a holiday leave as the company intensifies internal security testing of its networks, according to the Washington Post.