Google v China

飞雪寒冰

Ten weeks after raising the alarm over the hacking of Chinese users' e-mail accounts, Google yesterday ended censorship of its local Chinese search engine as threatened. Traffic will now be redirected to its uncensored Hong Kong arm. This is a lose-lose scenario.

飞雪寒冰

If Google had hoped to rally rivals to its cause, it failed. Within hours of Google's January statement, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft characterised it as the “Google problem”; commercial partners were then quick to do deals with others. If Google was planning to embarrass China by whipping up a global debate on internet freedom, it failed. The big Sino-US flashpoints remain the same: Taiwan, Tibet and the trade surplus. Events elsewhere, meanwhile – such as the conviction last month of Google executives in a Milan court, for privacy violations – made Beijing seem lenient.

Enlightened souls in China should rue the closure of Google.cn. At the opening event of this year's National People's Congress, a spokesman made an apparently sincere analogy between Baidu, China's default search champion, and Wang Meng, the gold medal-winning speed skater, breaking records thanks to a vigorous rival breathing down her neck. Still, in internet cafés outside big cities, closure of Google's Chinese site would barely register.

飞雪寒冰

Google may try to depict the last two months' wrangling as a success, on the grounds that its vaunted principles were upheld. Such a claim would be undermined, however, by the compromise it seems likely to strike: the search business goes, but the rest – 3 per cent of group sales last year – stays. Google's “new approach to China” would then be a stripped-down version of the old one. Meanwhile, the income it surrenders has been factored into the stock prices of Baidu, Tencent and the rest. And the Great Firewall of China seems more fearsome and impenetrable than ever.

简湘韵

汗，看的好累，苦，破英文水平

楚淮泉颍之滨

GOOGLE 不仅V 中国，还V 许多其他国家呢！！