A day after Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he was having second thoughts about the decisions and compromises the search giant made when it came to China, China is reportedly blocking the main Google.com domain, though Google.cn, the censored version of Google is not being affected. Retribution? What do you think?
That’s why they are doing actually.. they already have karge amounts of share in Baidu
i meant, just get the entire Google brand out of China completely.
getting out would simply be bad for business and wall street wouldn’t like it…
you don’t know anything about the topic. Google has been censored for weeks, only it was confirmed yesterday. Nothing to do with the boring declarations of a boring executive.
Yes to correct the info a little, Google has been shaky since around May 30th, it has never been fully blocked, but it was totally unusable, as just about every search request got blocked (instead of a DNS level block), and on a more up to date update: google is working perfectly as of today again…that at least means: no more yahoo for me, they are just too slow loading here
I definitely think there is a connection and I also think gmail, etc., will be working fine again in a few weeks.
I think you are mistaking the cause and the effect. Google has been blocked sphoradically for the last two weeks. It is a yearly ritual around this time of the year, due to the events that took place in Beijing 17 years ago during this period.
In addition, it is reasonable to assume that the plan in setting up a Chinese version for Google, includes denying access to the international version, or at least “encouraging” usage of the localized version.
On top of that – and that is a common and dangerous error that many foreign correspondents make – search results provided by Google.com ( the International site ) in China differ from those on other countries.
And one more thing, for ChinoChano: Google HAS been fully blocked in the past, and during some periods attempts to access Google.com from China were automatically reidrected to various local Search Engines.
Google should do what’s best for its business and shareholders. Principles have only “this much” brand equity. This whole china thing can be suicidal. The only person who should “principally” have a right to opinion about “Google in China”, is one who never buys anything “Made in China”.
Venkatesh, I think you are wrong. Unlike many, I think corporations should be held to higher standards than people. As Stan Lee so famously wrote, “with great power comes great responsibility.” When you as an individual support the totalatarian government in China, you do a tiny little bit of evil. When a multibillion dollar company supports that government, they do a large amount of evil.
jonathan, arguing that Google needs to stay in China for the sake of making money is coming very close to saying anything is alright as long as it is profitable. That is a very slippery slope. It leads to corporations knowingly releasing dangerous products based on the claculation that the liability is less than the cost of modifying or not releasing the product and other similar ills of our society. There’s a name for a person who does anything for money and most consider it an insult to be so named.
I’m presently living in China and I have a little insight into the topic. Most of my students (Chinese) spend the vast majority of their weekends in net cafes. They all know how to circumvent The Great Firewall of China and the government knows they know. Many popular proxy websites are NOT blocked by the government (probably because they’d rather deal with only a few sites than the 100 that would pop up if they took them down). This all about the Chinese concept of saving face. The government needs to at least appear to have the illusion of control even if they know damn well that they don’t have it. Let them have their pound of eFlesh (TM). Its far preferable to them taking the real thing.
So the logic is “Obey all U.S. laws no matter how evil, but disregard the laws or rules of others?!?!”
U.S. Telecoms can cooperate with the NSA when the U.S. government is KNOWN to have intentionally sent a Canadian citizen, in transit to Canada, to the Syrian Mukhabarat. He was tortured repeatedly before finally being released and when he tried to sue in the U.S., the Administration shut down his case because any investigation into what they had done would expose “State secrets.” It’s the same logic Cheney is trying to use to shut down Congressional investigation into the NSA spying.
Is Google abiding by Chinese law worse than this?
Patriot you are confusing the issue. The abuses you speak of are illegal in the US and if the telecoms really provided info to the NSA without search warrants, they were breaking the law. Anyway, if you remember Google was fairly outspoken that they would not aid the NSA unless legally compelled to do so. It is that attitude that makes it hypocritical of them to be doing business in China right now.