After all the dispute blazing up between Google and the Chinese Government, Google has finally decided to shutdown its Chinese search engine Google.cn and redirect all it’s traffic to Google Hong Kong. The news has been confirmed by Google on their official Google blog.
We have already informed you that in the view of the hardening of positions on both sides, Google has decided to close its operations in China, as the talks over the censorship row with the Chinese authorities reached a deadlock since January of this year. The Chinese government had already warned the US based search giant that it was not prepared to compromise on Internet censorship with Google in China.
Retaliating in a strong way to hacking attacks and to make a strong point, it was thought that Google had decided to call off the Android Developer Lab for Nexus One in Beijing, just a week ahead of the event. In a new update, a company spokesperson told All Things D that the report is erroneous.
In December last year, Gmail accounts of human rights activists in China were hacked by hackers who were based in China. The Google China fiasco then took a new turn when Google in a secret counter-offensive encounter managed to hack these Chinese hackers back by breaking into the source computer in Taiwan which was involved in these attacks. Google engineers also found out some evidence which indicated that the attacks were actually originated from mainland China and were possibly orchestrated by the Chinese government. After going public, and also announcing that other companies were attacked too, it became apparent that the Chinese were trying to steal trade secrets from US based companies.
The dispute over censorship row on Google search engine by Chinese authorities has not been resolved as yet. In fact, it has now gone so messy that Google has been forced to postpone the launch of two of its new Android phones from Motorola and Samsung on the Chinese mainland. These two Android phones were originally scheduled to be released on Wednesday on the China Unicom carrier. Google did not specify as to when or if ever the launch would take place.
There is yet another twist in the Google-China fiasco. According to the sources at Reuters, the hackers who attacked the human rights activist Gmail accounts took advantage of a flaw found in Internet Explorer, and they were also supported by insiders from within the Google network.
After the targeted cyber attacks on human right activists Gmail accounts that originated in China, the dismayed authorities at Google has threatened to withdraw its services from China, saying that it can no longer censor its search results on the Chinese version of Google homepage i.e. Google.cn. Google, in a detailed blog post said that if it is unable to find a way to operate an unfiltered search engine within the Chinese law, which currently requires it to block access to millions of websites, it will have no option but to close its operations in China.
