בלוג לשיווק באינטרנט, ייעוץ שיווקי, וורדפרס וחיים באינטרנט *

Here's the story as I understood it:

Google launched google.cn in 2006, agreeing to some censorship of the search results, in accordance with requests by the Chinese government.

Google's choice to concede to China's demands on censorship in 2006 led to accusations that it had betrayed its company motto: "don't be evil". Google argued it would be more damaging for civil liberties if it pulled out of China entirely.

Well you can attack that and just call the firm flat out greedy. But we'll give Google the benefit of the doubt.

It currently holds around a third of the Chinese search market, far behind Baidu, the Chinese government's lappy, who holds more than 60% of the market. Yahoo has less than 10%.

Next, note that there are nearly 340 million Chinese people now online, compared with 10 million only a decade ago. Last year, the search engine market in China was worth an estimated $1billion, and analysts previously expected Google to make about $600 million from China in 2010 – well, now it doesn't look that will happen, whether or not Google stays in Chinese.

Google reported last week that it had been targeted in a sophisticated cyber attack, which surely originated in the red country.

The company's investigation of the attack found two accounts of its online mail service – Gmail – illegally accessed.

The attack, however, was limited to accessing account information such as the date the account was created and subject line, rather than e-mail content.
It also discovered that the accounts of dozens of US, China and Europe-based Gmail users, who are "advocates of human rights in China", seemed to have been "routinely accessed by third parties".

The accounts were not accessed through any security breach at Google, but "most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on users' computers".

In addition, at least 20 other large companies from a wide range of businesses were also hit.

As a result, Google says that it will no longer censor search engine results in China, even if that means that it has to shut down all operations in the country.

Google had planned to launch two handsets running its Android operating system in cooperation Samsung and Motorola. Now, probably, China can forget about it!

China has played down the impact of the disagreement by hi-lighting the broader relationship with Washington. Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei said:

"The Google incident should not be linked to bilateral relations, otherwise that would be over-interpreting it."

Meanwhile Microsoft, with their new BING search engine and Yahoo, must be giggling among themselves.