Google-China Row

By
Shivi Tyagi
Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad

Internet giant Google may end its operation in China following a “Sophisticated and targeted” cyber attack originating from within the country. The issue came in light in wake of about more than 20 major U.S companies, internet, financial services, technology, media and chemical industries facing attacks on their computers for gathering personal information of about dozens of human rights activists trying to shine a light on China's alleged abuses. The heist lifted some of Google's intellectual property but didn't get any information about the users of its services, said Google. The assault on Google was primarily aimed at breaking into the company's e-mail service, "Gmail," in an attempt to breach into the confidentiality of the accounts of human right activists protesting against the Chinese government's policies. The company stated that only two e-mail accounts were infiltrated in these attacks, and the intruders were only able to see subject lines and the dates that the individual accounts were created, whereas content within the body of the e-mails wasn’t leaked out. During investigation Google also found that dozens of activists in United States, Europe and China, fighting the Chinese government's policies fell prey to "phishing" or malware.

Chinese authorities have been censoring online content by shutting domestic Web sites and blocking access to the overseas ones, like Facebook and Twitter. The government closed more than 100,000 Web sites in December as its censorship efforts, according to Tian Hou, a Capital analyst in New York. The Chinese government lays stringent laws for any foreign player, so even Google had to gives up some ethnics to do business in the ‘land of promise.’ It agreed to censor search results on its Chinese site to be launched in 2006. But in lieu of the recent happenings, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said his company opposes censorship in China and also plan to talk to the Chinese government to determine if there is a way the company can still provide unfiltered search results in the country. If an agreement can't be worked out, Google is prepared to leave China after four years of creating a search engine bearing China's Web suffix, ".cn" to put itself in a better position to profit from the world's most populous country.

With a complete exit from China, Google would be left on the sidelines of the world's largest  growing Internet market. The number of Chinese Web users will grow to 840 million that is 61 percent of the country's population, by 2013, according to New York-based EMarketer. This is almost 396 million more than the last year. .From a business perspective, if Google finally decides to quit China, its propagated ambition-’organize the world’s information’ is very likely to remain as a fantasy by leaving out nearly 400 million Chinese web users out of its reach. Google can in fact base its decision about Chinese business, on the account that it is just 1 percent of its annual revenue the last year(estimated by an analyst at Collins Stewart) and as such is not a big deal. But this might just be a footnote among the various reasons, Google is challenging Beijing.