Google 'may pull out of China after Gmail cyber attack'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8455712.stm

Internet giant Google has said it may end its operations in China following a "sophisticated and targeted" cyber attack originating from the country.
Google said the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists were the primary target of the attack.
The company did not accuse the Chinese government directly, but said it was no longer willing to censor its Chinese search engine - google.cn.

Seems like the honeymoon is over.

They've been dancing with the Devil, what on earth were they expecting? The dilemma for them, of course, is that they now risk having no presence in an emerging superpower that represents about a fifth of the entire population of Earth. They will have to hope that the likes of Microsoft want to be ethical more than they want Bing to be the top search engine, otherwise they're going to be left behind.

I've said it before, and recently - China has been allowed to become a big, powerful and ugly presence in the world because we in the west wanted cheap consumer goods more than we wanted to see 1.3 billion people enjoying the same rights and freedoms that we do. And thus we used our economic might to prop up Chinese communism just as we used it to knock down Soviet communism.

I cannot see China caring or be willing to debate the issue. It's an American company which will now be at a commercial disadvantage allowing a home-grown company to fill that space and profit (or Bing). These companies will be far more willing to adapt to the government's wishes as well.

The reason Google never launched a local version of Google Mail there was because of privacy concerns and Google didn't want the headache of the Chinese government demanding details of those who sent e-mails they didn't like. (Like Yahoo had).

[punky]

Originally Posted by Chris

They've been dancing with the Devil, what on earth were they expecting? The dilemma for them, of course, is that they now risk having no presence in an emerging superpower that represents about a fifth of the entire population of Earth. They will have to hope that the likes of Microsoft want to be ethical more than they want Bing to be the top search engine, otherwise they're going to be left behind.

I've said it before, and recently - China has been allowed to become a big, powerful and ugly presence in the world because we in the west wanted cheap consumer goods more than we wanted to see 1.3 billion people enjoying the same rights and freedoms that we do. And thus we used our economic might to prop up Chinese communism just as we used it to knock down Soviet communism.

Excellent post. Took the words right out of my mouth.

The only thing I would add is that i'm surprised its taken Google this long to suddenly take an ethical stance, particularly as one of the owners is from the Soviet Union.

Google being ethical don't make me laugh they havn't cared about that before and i doubt there is anything truly ethical driving this more like something we don't know about that they didn't like.

Originally Posted by RizzyKing

Google being ethical don't make me laugh they havn't cared about that before and i doubt there is anything truly ethical driving this more like something we don't know about that they didn't like.

Well they were hacked by China because they were trying to get access to the e-mails of anyone who was a Chinese activist or sympathetic to them (regardless of nationality) and now they seem to have had enough of it.

Google's founders do have a ethical bent and some of it is lost as it's expanded but they general protect peoples information and when they went to China they haven't given away details to the Chinese government unlike some internet firms and they had a warning saying the search results were censored so I would give them some credit.