Google, the world’s most popular search engine, said last week it was thinking about quitting China after suffering a sophisticated cyber-attack on its network that resulted in theft of its intellectual property.

The company has said it is no longer willing to filter content on its Chinese language google.cn engine, and will try to negotiate a legal unfiltered search engine, or exit the market.

The Great Firewall of China

Google’s getting some moral support from the government in its decision to stop censoring search in China.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke out against Internet censorship Thursday, saying the U.S. government is “committed to helping promote Internet freedom.” While she didn’t directly endorse Google’s decision to potentially shut down its China-based operations, Clinton did say that censorship “should not be in any way accepted by any company anywhere.” She also called upon China to fully investigate the cyberattacks that led to Google’s stance.
This whole Google-China debacle has snowballed faster than you can say “Pectoralis Major Minor in the Main Thing.” The truth, though, is that Google’s beef with China dates back nearly a decade — and these recent turns are really just the straws that broke the Google’s back. Here’s a timeline of the highs and lows that paved the way to the standoff we’re seeing now.

Timeline: Google-China Fiasco

Phase I: The Inception of Google in China

  • September 2000: Google introduces a Chinese version of its search engine at the Google.com domain.
  • September 2002: Access to Google’s site is completely blocked in China for about two weeks. It appears the domain name was hijacked and redirected — a move the Chinese government may have been behind. Soon thereafter, signs of restricted access and censored results begin to surface.

Phase II: The Age of Censorship


  • January 2006: Google relents and launches Google.cn, a specialized version of its search site that filters out pornographic and “politically sensitive” results. The company acknowledges that the filtering “clearly compromises [its] mission,” but notes that “failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population … [would do so] far more severely.”
  • March 2008: China blocks access to YouTube and Google News during riots in Tibet. It isn’t the first time China has blocked access to specific Google services, and it won’t be the last.
  • March 2009: Fast-forward one year, and YouTube gets the boot in China again. This ban, by most accounts, is still pretty much in place today.

Phase III: “China Threatens” – Pressure Tactic


  • June 2009: China finds some pornographic results in the Google.cn site and goes ballistic. The country blocks access to Google until the G-team wipes out every mention of the G-spot.
  • September 2009: The guy who ran the Google China operation since its inception steps down from his role. Analysts speculate that his departure might be a sign of broader problems between Google and the People’s Republic.

Phase IV: “Google Threatens” – Reverse Pressure Tactic

  • January 12, 2010: Google announces that it will no longer censor search results in China following an attack on its servers in the country. The attack, Google says, targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. “These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered … have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China,” Google explains in a blog posting. “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn. … We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

Phase V: “China Reacts” – Hey, we are the victims

  • January 14, 2010: According to Xinhua, China’s official news outlet, the Foreign Ministry is talking up the number of hacking attacks that China suffers. “China’s Internet is seriously threatened by cyber attacks like other countries,” said a spokesperson. Chinese numbers show a 148 percent year-over-year increase in hacking attacks.
  • As for Google, “Foreign companies in China should respect the laws and regulations, respect the public interest of Chinese people and China’s culture and customs and shoulder due social responsibilities. There is no exception for Google.”

Phase VI: Nobody Else is Leaving

  • January 14, 2010: A Globe & Mail analysis piece from Canada asks why few other companies are stepping up to back Google’s position.
  • “While the US State Department looks ready to stand by the Internet giant in its dispute with China, the other 33 foreign firms who were victims of the cyber-attack do not. Some are already looking at ways to jump into the void if Google—which runs the second most popular search engine in the country, well behind China’s own Baidu Inc.—carries through on its threat to leave. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has pointedly said that his company won’t be leaving China, where it has high hopes for its new Bing search engine.”

Phase VII: Inside Job?

  • January 18, 2010: Someone hacks into the Gmail accounts of foreign journalists at two Beijing news bureaus. This may or may not be related to the main attack, but its timing certainly doesn’t help with the tension.
  • January 18, 2010: It’s little more than an anonymously sourced rumor at this point, but Reuters says that insiders from Google’s own Chinese office may have been involved in the cyberattack on the company. Chinese sources have reported that Google China was cut off from Google’s internal network last week while Google security staff investigated the allegations and secured the network.

Phase VIII: Google’s Pissed of Now…No Chinese Android

  • January 19, 2010: Google announces it’s postponing the release of two Android phones in China. Reports indicate the delay is related to the company’s ongoing talks with Chinese authorities.

Phase IX: US Govt. Sides with Google


  • January 21, 2010: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lashes out against Internet censorship. But you already know that.

Phase X: China Hits back

  • January 22, 2010: Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu insists that the Internet is open in China and warns that the U.S. should “properly handle differences” over the issue or risk damaging bilateral relations. ”We urge the U.S. side to respect the facts, and to stop using the so-called Internet freedom issue to make groundless charges against China,” Mr. Ma said in a statement posted on the ministry’s Web site.
  • January 24, 2010: The disruption to Google’s services reported by users in Beijing and Shanghai comes a week after China accused Google of deliberately linking to “pornographic and vulgar” websites and ordered it to stop. ”We have found that Google has spread a lot of pornographic content, which is a serious violation of Chinese laws and regulations,” Mr Qin told reporters on Thursday.
  • January 24, 2010: China demands that all computers come supplied with software called Green Dam Youth Escort from 1 July, which it says would filter out pornographic content.

What is this all about? It may be..

Trade Wars?

The latest comment raises the concern about a broader trade war between the US and China over everything from computer security to chicken poultry imports. It came a day after it filed an unfair trade complaint to the World Trade Organization (WTO) over raw material exports.

The US is now complaining that putting such pressure on manufacturers to pre-install or supply the software would violate China’s WTO free trade obligations.

“China is putting companies in an untenable position by requiring them, with virtually no public notice, to pre-install software that appears to have broad-based censorship implications and network security issues,” said US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.

The Green Dam Youth Escort software was created to stop people looking at “offensive” content such as pornographic or violent websites, China has said.

But China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology later said that use of the software was not compulsory and that it was possible to uninstall the program.

Censorship?

But censorship isn’t just a Chinese phenomena.

Last week, researcher Rebecca MacKinnon pointed out in a Guardian piece that local laws all over the world require Google to take various kinds of material: neo-Nazi items in France, child porn in many democracies, taunting and violent user videos in Italy. The basic issue for MacKinnon is who becomes liable?

“But if democracies decide that the primary solution to all these internet-era problems is to hold internet and mobile companies heavily liable for policing users – rather than finding some other way to fight crime and address other socially undesirable behaviour – authoritarian leaders around the world can also breathe a sigh of relief that the so-called free world is moving in their direction rather than the other way round.”

What about India?

Google has been happy to censor material in India, even without the government asking it to do so. “In September, lawyers at Google Inc.’s New Delhi office got a tip from an Internet user about alarming content on the company’s social networking site, Orkut. People had posted offensive comments about the chief minister of India’s southern state of Andhra Pradesh, who had died just a few days earlier in a helicopter crash. Google’s response: It removed not just the material but also the entire user group that contained it, a person familiar with the matter says.”

Freedom of speech in India can be tricky when the local penal code allows jail time and fines for those who speak or write with the “deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings” of other Indians.

Google Disguising the acceptance of failure in China?

Baidu defeats Google in the Chinese market. Compared to Google, Baidu does a better job in the understanding of the local market, understanding of Chinese characters in Mandarin and the relations with advertisers.

As per China Daily “China’s flourishing Internet industry and society demonstrates the country’s Internet world develops well under its characteristic management. The market will continue its development in its own way, no matter whether there is Google.cn or not. It is unfair to China that the west puts their finger into China’s Internet regulation.”

What should Google do?

Google Needs China, Moving Out Not a Solution

In the near future China will be an enormously large portion of the Internet, and Google cannot ignore more than 1 billion potential users. Currently, Google’s market share in China is about 33%, with China’s Baidu.com ( BIDU – news – people ) dominating the market. With China’s customer base, there is no reason that Baidu couldn’t become as large as or larger than Google. Access to China’s customer base will help Google maintain its global lead in the search engine market and allow the search giant to continue investing in innovation and helping the U.S. stay the leader in technology and entrepreneurship.

More importantly, the tension between Google and the Chinese government also points to fault lines around the regulation of the Internet as it grows internationally. Internet activity was originally centered in the U.S., but as more emerging economies with large populations continue to grow, the Internet will slowly shift toward the largest revenue base. Policing the Internet through an international organization made up of multiple national governments is difficult, if not impossible, to do. For now at least, companies will simply have to decide between making a political statement or a profit.