The Blog Post that Could Change the World

The single largest business event of this young year was announced yesterday by Internet mega-company Google in that they are demanding an end to censorship of the web in China or they will pull the plug on google.cn.

Google's own blog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html is claiming that Google search engines as well as 20 other well known companies were the target of a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China in mid December 2009.  Google says that the difference between this attack and the regularly occuring types of cyber attacks that companies like Google face all the time was that it targeted the names and private information of Human Rights protesters.

"...we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers." -Official Google Blog

 My already high impression of Google as a company has gone up substantially, who would have thought that Free Enterprise and a Corporate giant like Google could be the impetus for change in China and actually put it's money where it's mouth is?  I have read that China accounts for 12% of Google's revenues.  When you are talking about billions of dollars a year in income 12% is in the multiple 100's of millions of dollars!

"These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised."  -Official Google Blog 

We take for granted here in the West our ability to write pretty much whatever we want on forums such as this.  This very Blog article is probably banned in China as is the piece that is quoted.  Good Luck Google and thank you for doing a very costly 'Right Thing'.