Google May Stop Its Operations in China

13 January 2010 No Comment

Internet Giant Google has created a buzz by making an announcement, that it could quit China after hackers broke in to Google China and tried to access the email accounts of Human Right Activists of China.

China is the biggest Internet Market in the world with more that 350 million users and search revenue of more than $1 billion. China is one of those marketing where Google is not the leading search engine. Google only have 30% market share of search engine market in china whereas its main competitor Baidu has 60% of market share.

Google announcement comes after the meeting between representatives of Internet Giants like Google, Twitter, Microsoft and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Hilary Clinton is set to announce the new technical policy of United states next week to help citizens around the world have access to an uncensored Web.

Anyone doing business in China must adhere to strict Chinese Censorship rules that ban discussion or display of pages on sensitive topics ranging from Tibetan independence to the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement. All companies like Google, Baidu and Sina have to follow these rules, but none of them speak publicly about it.

Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said ” We have uncovered the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the Web. These sophisticated attacks were made on the email accounts of human right activists, which made us to think about our decision to continue our operations in china.”

Shares of Google fell by 1.3 percent after this announcement whereas Baidu Shares jumped 6.8 percent. Sina shares gained 1.3 percent.

A Google spokesperson said the company was still investigating the attack and would not say whether Google believed Chinese authorities were involved.

“We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all,” Drummond said.

Edward Yu, chief executive of Beijing-based research firm said ” This is really a shocking news as we would be left with fewer choices in China , if Google decided to quit. Also, these rules would prevent big Internet players from investing in to Chinese Market.”