Internet giant “Google” may pull out of China after what Google claimed to be a sophisticated and targeted cyber attack. This cyber attack originated from China and while Google did not directly accuse China, it said that it was no longer willing to censor its China based search engine google.ch. This Chinese search engine was launched by Google in 2006 and Google agreed to censor some search results on the request of the Chinese government. This could warrant closing down of google.ch and all the Google offices in the country.
This cyber attack on the search engine was targeted towards the email accounts of a few Chinese human rights activists. Google claimed that its investigations lead to the information that The Gmail account details of a few human rights activists was accessed through illegal phishing scams and malware software placed on the computers of the users. There was no breach of security involved with Google. The information which was hacked was only the date of creation of the accounts and the subject lines and do details of the email were compromised. Google believes that the Chinese government had some hand in it and wants to hold talks with the Government officials about operating a clean, unfiltered search engine in China.
Google also claimed that the investigations lead to the fact that email accounts of many Gmail users in China, Europe and the US were accessed by unknown third parties. These users were lawyers of human rights activists in China. Google is very disappointed with the Chinese government and wants to hold talks with the officials about unwarranted cyber attack. Google.ch is only the second most used search engine in china holding a market share of 60%. The leader and Google’s arch competitor, Baidu claims that the move by Google is hypocritical and financially driven. Whatever the motive behind the cyber attack on Google it looks like the Internet giant is very serious about pulling out from China.
There has been so much buzz about the whole scenario that the stock prices of both companies Google and Baidu were affected. The share price of Google went down by 0.57% and that of Baidu went up by 13%. People are also calling it a publicity stunt by Google to make up for the lagging market share in China. Google had complied with a few censorship moves to filter out certain search results on the behest of the Chinese government. The government’s motive behind these cyber attacks is not known and there has been no direct comment from any of the Chinese government officials.
Should Google actually pull out of China which will lead to the closing down of all its China offices? The move is being contemplated by the Internet Company and things will only be positively decided after another 2 weeks within which the company will hold talks with the government officials. Google plans on putting down the offer of running an unbiased, unfiltered search engine within the law frame of the country.
Is Google justified pulling out of China?
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