If you really think Google’s stand is about human rights then you are delusional. If anything, I’m more worried about Google knowing who the human rights activists are among their customers than about the fact that the Chinese government has such list. After all, while the oppressive regime’s job is to know that, Google has no business knowing that much about me as a user.

Google is evil. Google sucks!

SUre, that will be what causes the overthrow of the Chinese government. Not basic human rights or oppressive government policies. It’s the loss of Google that will be behind the revolution.

It depends.

It can be very easy if the Chinese govt is satisfied with a blacklist of sites and keywords that they provide.

will others follow?

time will tell.

One advantage of being a superpower is that you don’t have to pay your bills. Of course, if you don’t, you risk having folks not loan you money in the future, but Argentina has showed that they probably will.

The US does not depend on China to buy its products. China depends on the US to buy its products. The loans are a counter-balance to the trade imbalance.

I believe someone on this blog mentioned it – a Chinese citizen posting from there.

Chinese netizens that use Google hack their way around the controls and go to Google.com

I genuinely believe that Google was finding that enough folks do that, that it made no sense to continue pouring money into maintaining an infrastructure that hurts their credibility and isn’t bringing the kind of returns they are used to.

Nokia, Siemens, and other companies that actually sell a product (rather than provide a geographically independent service) have a hard binary choice – either sell their stuff their or not.

You have a valid point with the other search engines, but to be honest, most of them don’t have the luxury of walking away from *any* revenue. And regardless… Their “wrongs” can hardly be said to make Google “right” in this. From day 1 Google was big enough that if morality was the issue, they could have simply never gone in. That they went in, and stayed in, tells me that the pullout now is not some catharsis.

I don’t fault Google (companies make business decisions), and I like the work they have done… I just think that *all* corporations need to be watched closely and need the cold eye of cynicism cast upon them continually. I think Google especially (but certainly Apple as well) get far too much of a pass in this area by the technorati.

I do believe you win the prize. Google is a corporation with rapidly increasing share price and impossibly wealthy board members.

This is about money. Add up the facts…

1) they do not have great marketshare in China
2) on top of that they are having to *spend* money to maintain a different version of their core product
3) possibly ad revenue doesnt flow so well from China – would be interesting to investigate the habits of the Chinese consumer and how highly valued “internet eyeballshare” is for advertisers in China
4) on top of this they are now having to start spending nice big money on security and countermeasures thanks to the insane Chinese govt

If they pull out, they get a nice media win (like this here), they lose possibly very little, and they may actually “win” the confrontation. They know that this will also….

DRIVE MORE CHINESE TO HACK THEIR WAY AROUND TO GOOGLE.COM

Which is where Google wants them anyway…

Come on Jeff. Apply the cynicism you would apply to Microsoft to Google for one second and can you honestly say you cannot imagine other motives here besides altruism? If it were altruism, they would NEVER have gone NEAR China to begin with and would have encouraged Chinese to revolt and hack their way onto Google.com. Publish documents FRONT AND CENTER for avoiding China’s firewalls and filters… Instead they complied, checked it out… found it was REALLY annoying and expensive and NOT panning out, and course corrected. Like ANY corporation.

It is as easy to hack from across the planet as it is from next door. WSJ tech reporters surely understand that better.
Nor is this a significant moral stance thing. Purely commercial. Censoring is very hard work and expensive and nobody would want to do this voluntarily.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/12/google%E2%80%99s-china-stance-more-about-business-than-thwarting-evil/