TECHdodo

There are a flurry of posts out there about Google and China. Google had an attack this week, which apparently originated from China. Google threatened to leave China. Everyone is posting about what this might mean… to China, to Google, to the Chinese people, to the world? Now the US government is asking for an explanation from the Chinese government.

Cyber attacks are bad and all, and I realize that they are saying these attacks were stealing intellectual property and may have originated from the Chinese government or people somehow associated with the government, but Cyber attacks occur every day.

Would Google really pull out of China? Google, despite their “do no Evil tagline”, is a business. Once you are a publicly traded business in the US, it seems you have one goal and one goal only. It is your job to make money for your shareholders no matter what the cost. Google makes money by getting the most number of eyeballs to see their pages, and their ads and use their software. China has a lot of eyeballs.

Will the US government really do anything about it? We are in a lot of debt, and a lot of it is to China. Also our economy is based on American’s ability to buy cheap goods they don’t really need. This too is reliant on China. Unlike most American companies, Google isn’t in China because they benefit from their low wages and cheap manufacture (and often poor quality) of goods, they are in China because it increases their market share. The only reason they would leave China is if, long term, it was profitable for them to do so.Companies do business with China for one reason and one reason only. Money. They go there, because it is profitable, or at least they think it will be profitable, for them to do so. They go there at first to get goods they can sell in the US made more cheaply, and then they hope that one day they will be able to tap into the huge market that China is, or will become. Then why is China the one with all the Money and the US government is the one who has to keep borrowing it from them?

China is their own country and their ways and laws may not be like ours but if companies, and our own government, want to work with them and make money from them, they know who China is before they go in. They can’t act surprised after they get there. Google can’t say, we don’t like China’s censorship, so we are going to pull out if they don’t let us operate without censorship. If they didn’t like China’s censorship, then they shouldn’t have ever gone in in the first place. There was enough potential money there though that, despite their do no evil promotional philosophy, they went in anyway.

I would love to see Google put their money where their mouth is and leave China. Show that they mean what they say and set an example for others. Microsoft has already stated they will stay in China and play by China’s rules. Google either needs to do the same or leave. If they do the same, it will make them look foolish. If they leave, their stockholders might not appreciate it. It is kind of ironic too, that Google was apparently hacked through an exploit in Microsoft’s web browser when they are so heavily pushing the use of their own web browser, Google Chrome. They are telling the world to use their browser, but apparently their own employee’s, or at least some of them, are not using it.