Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Google Reviewing 'Feasibility' Of Doing Business In China, Citing Cyber Attacks

Google has officially announced 1) they were hacked, 2)they are casting suspicion on the Chinese Government for attempting to hack into Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists 3)they will stop censoring our results on Google.cn in order to do business in China and 4)at least 20 other large companies were similarly targeted.

Google blog:

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to 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.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.


About time Google told China to go to hell instead of bowing down to every demand they made.

Google also introduces some additional security measures to keep information safe in another article.

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