Search giant Google may pull out of China due to recent discoveries and rows about censorship in the country.
Google’s latest findings have led the company to announce that it will no longer censor Google.cn, its Chinese search engine, even if this means it will have to withdraw business from China completely.
The decision to remove censorship in the country has been sparked by Google’s discovery of attacks on its own corporate infrastructure that originated in China and had the purpose of stealing intellectual property from Google.
Google has stated that it has evidence the aim of the attacks were to gain access to the Gmail accounts of various Chinese human rights activists, and although attackers only succeeded in accessing two accounts, and in these two cases only subject lines rather than email contents were accessed, other Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights advocates based both in China itself and in Europe have been hacked by third parties.
Google has stressed that the third-party hacking was not due to a Google security breach and was probably achieved via malware or phishing scams, but it believes the correlation with the other cases to be more than coincidental. It didn’t go so far as to point the finger of suspicion at the Chinese government, but many others have speculated that the government is connected to the attacks.
Google has argued previously with the Chinese government over censorship issues, but does still currently block some search results, including images of and information about the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.
Baidu
Although Google dominates the search market in the UK and the US, in China it only has a fraction of the market. China’s search market is dominated by search engine Baidu, which was incidentally hacked itself last week by a group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army.
So with Baidu holding so much of the search market share, and the increasingly fractious nature of the Google/China relationship, does Google have a future in the country?
Google has stated that it will be reviewing the feasibility of future business operations in China and, following its decision to cease censorship in the country, says it will look to discuss the possibility of operating an unfiltered service there which operates within the law. The search giant also stated that if this cannot be achieved, it recognises shutting down Google.cn may be the only option.
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