Following their philosophy, Google will shift its search engine, but not shut down altogether and will maintain other operations in China. By balancing its stance against censorship with its desire to profit from the overwhelming magnitude of the Internet market in China.
This week visitors to Google.cn were being redirected to Google's Chinese-language service based in Hong Kong (google.com.hk). Google-China war could not resolve an impasse pitting the world's most powerful Internet company against the world's most populous country. Thus, Google plans to keep its engineering and sales offices in China, which will allow it to keep a technological hold in the country.
It is hard to see Google's stance as a brave move towards human rights even though Amnesty International was among the first to congratulate Google for pushing out of China in early January. Google's ideology on censorship could crimp its growth and prevent future business with China. In mid January Google detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure, which was originated from China and resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. Besides Google, the attacks were also directed at more than 20 companies around the world. A Google representative said, "This was not an assault on cloud computing. It was an attack on the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical... we believe our customer cloud-based data remains secure."
The cyber attacks were prying into the emails of human activists who were opposed to the ruling party. Google stated, "Google said that the primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. It is reported that only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed. Further, the company added that the Gmail accounts of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based people who advocate Chinese human rights development is appeared to have been routinely accessed by third parties."
With all Google efforts, it hoped to persuade China's government, which would let it run a search engine with unrestricted results. The next plan is to find enough common ground to remain in China as a research center.
