The IT Nerd

As expected, the Chinese have responded to Google moving to using the Google Hong Kong search engine for China. According to The New York Times, the Chinese government has whipped the Great Firewall into action so that search results can be filtered. Not that anyone expected anything otherwise.

Oh yeah, I should also note that the Chinese are also really pissed off at Google:

The government denounced Google on Tuesday, calling its decision “totally wrong,” and the state-run news media accused Google of politicizing the Internet by trying to foist Western content on Chinese users.

Charming. There’s more:

China’s biggest cellular communications company, China Mobile, was expected to cancel a deal that had placed Google’s search engine on its mobile Internet home page, used by millions of people daily. In interviews, business executives close to industry officials said the company was planning to scrap the deal under government pressure, despite the fact that China Mobile has yet to contract with a replacement.

Similarly, China’s second-largest mobile company, China Unicom, was said by analysts and others to have delayed or killed the imminent introduction of a cellphone based on Google’s Android platform. One major Internet portal, Tom.com, already had ceased using Google to power its search engine.

I guess the next move is Google’s. Any bets on what that might be?

You might recall that I posted about Google announcing that they could be pulling out of China today. Well, they did. Sort of. The search engine giant decided to route all of it’s Google.cn to Hong Kong. That way Google users in in China get uncensored search results. That’s guaranteed to really annoy someone in the Chinese government. Here’s what Google had to say about this via their blog:

Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced—it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China.

I’m guessing that it won’t take long before we find out what China does about this, but it’s a brilliant strategy by Google. If China does nothing, they win and can spin that as a victory for truth, freedom, and the American way. If China shuts down Google, then Google still wins as they can say that they didn’t leave China but were forced out by the Chinese. Thus they are fighting for truth, freedom, and the American way.

The question is, which way will this go.

BusinessWeek says they do:

The search engine may announce its exit on March 22, the Shanghai-based newspaper reported, citing an unidentified Google China employee. It may also reveal plans for its China workforce on the same day, according to the report.

The company hasn’t confirmed the April 10 date for its pullout, the newspaper cited the sales agent as saying. Tokyo- based spokeswoman for the company, Jessica Powell, declined to comment on the report.

One has to wonder is this is for real, a rumor with no facts behind it, or a negotiation tactic.  Whatever it is, it was good enough to convince BusinessWeek to run the story. Assuming that this is true, there’s no way back into China if they pull the plug:

A pullout by the U.S. company would mean it will probably be unable to return to the world’s biggest Internet market by users, Peter Lui, formerly the company’s financial controller for the Asia Pacific region, said in an interview.

The public manner in which Google announced its intention means it may have “burnt bridges and they’ve burnt the Google brand in China,” Lui, 45, said yesterday. “There is no way Google can ever come back.”

I’m kind of surprised that this wasn’t brought up earlier. I guess if you’re Microsoft or Yahoo and you want to make inroads into the Chinese market, that’s great news to you. But it would suck to be Google if they decided to change their mind later on.

I’ve put reminder in my copy of MS Outlook to check in on the 22nd to see if this is true. You might want to do the same.

If you believe the Wall Street Journal [Paywall, copy the title into Google, click search and click the link to read the full text], that’s apparently on the table in Google HQ:

A person familiar with situation said on Saturday that Google is likely to take action within weeks. Separately, Chinese authorities on Friday told local news Web sites that Google’s Chinese site is likely to close and that, if it does, the news sites will be required to use only official accounts of the situation, rather than publish stories from anywhere else, according to a person familiar with the order.

You’ll recall that Google and China have been butting heads over censorship and the fact that some Gmail accounts that belonged to some human rights activists were apparently hacked by someone within China. Both sides have been talking, but it seems that the endgame is near and Google is willing to walk away from 36% of the search engine market in that country. Right now China doesn’t seem to be too bothered by it, but one wonders if that will change if Google does pull the plug.

Stay tuned, this is going to get very interesting.

If you were wondering if Google was serious about pulling out of China, this might be the first hint that they are. According to The Globe And Mail the launch of two Android phones in China has been postponed:

One person briefed on Google’s decision said it was linked to the company’s threat that it will shut its Chinese-based search engine if restrictions aren’t eased.

The company concluded it would “not be a good experience” for consumers to receive a phone right now with its applications, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

Google really seems intent on proving that they aren’t joking when they say that they want things to change when it comes to their dealings with China or they’re leaving the country.  It will be interesting to see how China responds to this as I can’t imagine them being happy about this news.

Here’s an interesting plot twist to this Google vs. China story. How does Google find out who’s really responsible for the hacks that they’ve detected? Simple, they hack the hackers right back:

It managed to gain access to a computer in Taiwan that it suspected of being the source of the attacks. Peering inside that machine, company engineers actually saw evidence of the aftermath of the attacks, not only at Google, but also at at least 33 other companies, including Adobe Systems, Northrop Grumman and Juniper Networks, according to a government consultant who has spoken with the investigators.

Seeing the breadth of the problem, they alerted American intelligence and law enforcement officials and worked with them to assemble powerful evidence that the masterminds of the attacks were not in Taiwan, but on the Chinese mainland.

Geez. This wasn’t just a one time deal. How evil. Hopefully the companies that were hacked along with Google take whatever steps to ensure their security. As for who’s behind this, it’s not so clear:

But while much of the evidence, including the sophistication of the attacks, strongly suggested an operation run by Chinese government agencies, or at least approved by them, company engineers could not definitively prove their case. Today that uncertainty, along with concerns about confronting the Chinese without strong evidence, has frozen the Obama administration’s response to the intrusion, one of the biggest cyberattacks of its kind, and to some extent the response of other targets, including some of the most prominent American companies.

Lovely. But at least it puts the perps on notice that when you hack Google, you’re hacking the wrong people.

China has responded to Google’s threat to exit China due to some Gmail accounts that are tied to human rights activists being hacked. China responded in a manner that you’d expect. Here’s what they said via foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu:

“China’s Internet is open,” Ms. Jiang said. “China welcomes international Internet enterprises to conduct business in China according to law.”

Good luck with that. Here’s why I say that. If Google sticks to their guns and wins, Internet access in China will be more open than it is now. If Google loses and bolts from China, Google still wins because they would have stood up to the Chinese and their “Great Firewall Of China,” not to mention living up to their corporate motto of “don’t be evil.” So assuming that China actually cares about its image, then it’s they who are on the wrong end of this fight.

You’ll also notice that in the story that I linked to, the US government is monitoring the situation:

Mr. [Robert] Gibbs [White House spokesman] said the White House is awaiting China’s response to Google’s announcement. Asked whether the incident could cause a U.S.-China chill, Mr. Gibbs said: “We stood in China when we gave the answer about a free Internet. So, the president and this administration have beliefs about the freedom of the Internet.”

Bottom line: The stakes are high. Really high. Stay tuned for what happens next.

Imagine you’re Google for a second. You’ve tried to filter search results to keep the Chinese government happy and you’ve tried to behave yourself while taking heat for doing so. But when you discover that the Gmail accounts belonging to human rights activists have been hacked, what do you do? You apparently reconsider your operations in China:

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

So where do things go from here? Google is going to talk to the Chinese government and figure out a way to operate an unfiltered search engine in a legal way. If that doesn’t get sorted out, Google is going to close Google.cn and maybe leave the country. Bravo Google! The only question I have is this: What took you so long to grow a pair?