Could Google Leave China?

David Drummond - Google Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

In an in-depth and open blog post on the Official Google Blog, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond detailed recent events that may lead the multinational company to consider its position in China.

In December, Google says they suffered what is described as a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” whereby their intellectual property was stolen.

This attack seems not to have been limited to Google, they go on to say that other businesses from across a wide range of sectors were also targeted.

One “primary goal” seems to have been to gain access to Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, although it is not believed these attacks were successful (or only had limited non-critical success).

Furthermore it appears that some US, Chinese, and European Gmail users advocating human rights in China have been “routinely accessed by third parties” not via hacking but by other means such as malware, phishing, etc..

Perhaps the most astonishing statements are made in the second-last paragraph:

“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 implications of this are truly massive. China is around 19.5% of the population, for a company like Google to consider voluntarily leaving shows how seriously it is taking recent events.

The full blog post from Mr Drummond can be read on his post to the Official Google Blog.

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