Google China War

Google said that a "highly sophisticated and targeted" attack against its network last month originated in China, and tried to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, said that attacks have forced the company to "review the feasibility of our business operations in China." Google, continued Drummond, is "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." The end result of those discussions, said Drummond, may be that Google shuts down its search engine and close its offices in the People's Republic of China.

Yahoo (YHOO) was drawn into the growing international cyber-war between Google (GOOG) and the Chinese government after it declared its support of the U.S.-based search giant including Yahoo. Yahoo said it is "aligned with Google" in its rebuke of Chinese censorship, and condemned "any attempts to infiltrate company networks to obtain user information." By supporting Google, Yahoo has drawn the ire of Alibaba (ALBCF), the Chinese internet company in which it owns a 40% minority stake. "Alibaba Group has communicated to Yahoo! that Yahoo's statement that it is 'aligned' with the position Google took last week was reckless given the lack of facts in evidence," Alibaba, which operates two of China's largest e-commerce businesses, said in a statement.

Google has delayed the debut of two mobile phones designed to connect with its Internet services in China, widening the void that might be opened if the company and Beijing can't resolve their rift over online censorship and security. The phones, made by Motorola and Samsung, use the Android operating system, created by Google to steer people to its search engine and other services. China Unicom Ltd. was supposed to be the carrier.

For Google (GOOG), it could be as much as half a billion dollars this year if the web giant closes its Chinese-language website, according to investment bank UBS. That outcome looked increasingly likely Monday evening after Chinese officials warned Google's partners and imposed a media blackout on news of the standoff, according to reports.

Google began redirecting all google.cn traffic to google.com.hk (Google Hong Kong), thereby bypassing Chinese regulators and allowing uncensored simplified Chinese search results. Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region in China with a high level of freedom of speech and expression, and google.jpg google.com.hk does not censor search results, making it more effective for networking and sharing information with Internet users in mainland China. Redirecting google.cn to google.com.hk thus leads to the availability of uncensored search results to the people of mainland China. “While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission,” a statement by the internet giants said. It is believed that this could be the beginning of the end of the Google brand in China. However, the shutdown of Google China would not significantly affect Google Inc., as it is only a very small subsidiary.

Searching via all Google search sites (not only google.cn but all language versions, e.g. google.co.jp. google.com.au, etc.), including Google Mobile, are banned in Mainland China. Any attempt to search by Google resulted in only get a DNS error instead. Other Google services such as Google Mail and Google Maps appeared to be unaffected. Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at UC Berkeley and founder of the China Digital Times, noted that the ban in mainland China could eventually block all access to Google sites and applications if the Chinese Government wanted.