Google announced this week that it would stop censoring search results under China's censorship policies and was considering abandoning the country altogether, after a series of expert cyber attacks on the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights advocates. The search giant said that it had launched Google.cn in China in January 2006 hoping to give the people of China greater access to online information, and would shut down rather than contribute to Beijing's efforts to curb free speech on the Web. Is Google powerful enough to get the Chinese government to bend its rules? (Watch an AP report about Google's threat against China)
Google probably can't win: Experts don't think Google can win "any concessions from Beijing censors," says V. Phani Kumar in Marketwatch. And while shutting down in China won't cost Google much revenue in the short term, it "may have a far-reaching effect on the company's overall long-term growth rate." China has the biggest Internet market in the world — measured by number of users — and online advertising there has nowhere to go but up.
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