Google Responds to China’s Actions

UFC 1337: Google vs. China

To the surprise of most everybody who read this, Google has grown a pair in the fight for free speech and against internet censorship. Well.. at least they say they are..

…the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. 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. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

This comes after the apparent attack upon Google and other American organizations originating from China.

In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.

As of the time I wrote this post Google.cn is still up, so no preemptive praise just yet. I’m going to be interested to hear what else pops up about this story in the near future.

Read on

Some other insight so far:

RSnake
Rep. Eshoo Responds to Attack on Google

Cheers,
Matt