After a months-long battle between Google and China, Google disabled its Google.cn website
effective immediately while redirecting all the users to its Google.com.hk site which offers uncensored results. Google’s R&D wing will remain in China with its operations up as usual.
Although Google.cn results were censored in accordance to the Chinese laws, its Hongkong counterpart has a different story with the results not censored. Hong Kong does have its independent rules and the only way Chinese governement can stop its people from the redirection is to cancel the top level .cn domain name which the Google analysts believe is highly unlikely.
Google intends to remain in China with its R&D wing active is an attempt to remain in a largely explosive market where its annual revenue is about $500 Million with the ad revenue to be about $20 billion. Google will continue to serve and accept ads from China.
While Google still remain in China, solely to remain in competition and not to loose out on business, it still poses quite a challenge, now that its market share and market reach is reduced due to lesser products being offered. A posting to the company’s blog, where Google has announced most important changes to policy, details the company’s plans.
[…] The US Government had expressed concern on the vulnerability of the electric grid and has asked for an immediate upgrade of the system. It must be noted that Google had shut its offices in China following a massive complex cyber attack on its servers. You may read that report here. […]
[…] not state if it would comply with the demands or not. Google did have a rough time dealing with the Chinese government over the censorship issue. Skype on the other hand is said to be working with the Indian government […]