Google's partial pullout from China provides more questions than answers
Published March 23, 2010
In a development expected by few industry analysts, Google took an unexpected course of action in moving to resolve its conflict with the Chinese government: It escalated the fight, taking down the government-imposed censorship controls on its search results and moving its servers to Hong Kong.
The company's Google.cn web portal is still active, but many of Google's additional services - such as Sites, YouTube and Blogger - were not accessible from mainland China. Google has put up an informational website with the active status of its major services within the country.
In an official blog post announcing the move, Google senior vice president David Drummond wrote that "figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement."
Digital marketing in the burgeoning Chinese internet market is sure to be affected by the ongoing drama.