The past couple of days has been rather interesting as the world watches Google the Internet behemoth stand up to another Goliath – the Chinese Government. As much as I live Google and support much of their really cool products I tend to be in the camp opposing what Google had just done. An article on econsultancy “Google tries to have its cake and eat it too in China” has a really good POV on the matter.
Google made a heroic stand 2 months ago when it challenged the Chinese government and said it would stop censoring the search results it shows to mainland China. After 2 months of chewing on its words and thumb twiddling amongst themselves, they realized 2 very important things:
1. You don’t mess with China
2. China is a really HUGE & $PROFITABLE$ market
So, after much deliberation, I would think they flipped a coin and decided that they would give it a gamble – live up to their motto of “Don’t be evil” and still try to milk the cash cow for what it’s worth.
First, let’s look at the facts at hand. Mainland Chinese users who visit Google.cn are now re-directed automatically to Google.com.hk. These users are served up a separate Simplified Chinese version of Google, tailor made for China but served through Google’s servers in Hong Kong, which sits nicely outside the jurisdiction of the Chinese government. Advertisers’ campaigns continue to run without interruption to service as though nothing had happened. Google then sends out an appeal, in the name of freedom of speech, to China pleading with them not to disrupt the services they have in Hong Kong. Knowing full well the extent that China will go to to ensure the “peace” and “security” of their country, it seems absurd that such an appeal would be taken seriously.
Therefore, the Google.com.hk service that we get served up in mainland China is already beginning to crumble at the hands of the ruthless filters. Certain keywords are already being censored and brings up no results. This does not significantly change the search usage of users, but it will most definitely begin to impede search usage in the long term.
To which end, the trend would push search usage towards Baidu, the current dominant leader in China, and would-be only search leader in China. Of course, Google’s exit also provides opportunities for other smaller players to scramble for that minority 30% of the market Google had. No guesses for which company is going to be accelerating on aggression – Bing, from Microsoft.
The market is open and it will be interesting to see how everything plays out when the dust settles.