Google To Shut Down Chinese Division In April

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Google and China have been going back and forth for two months over the Chinese government (allegedly) hacking Google’s servers with the intent of attempting to acquire information on certain Chinese civil rights activists. In retaliation for the attacks, Google said they would cease censoring search results on Google.cn, or cease doing business in China. Now, according to a report from Bloomberg, they’ve packing up and leaving the world’s biggest market.

According to Bloomberg, Google is expected to officially announce its departure from China sometime today, citing information from a Google China employee. The leak comes from an alleged Google China ad sales agent, although Google wouldn’t confirm anything when Bloomberg called. Google’s great Chinese pull-out will allegedly happen on April 10th.

To recap, in January, Google made a posting on their official corp blog, alleging that they had been tracking China attempting to hack their servers to access Gmail accounts of Chinese civil rights activists, ones both in and out of China. At the time, Google say that while their servers were secure, the hackers did manage to get some information from their targets via social engineering. As for retaliation for the attacks, Google said they would cease censoring search engine results in the country (for example, results on Tiananmen Square, Tibet, etc.)

This may, or may not, have an effect on Android phones being sold in China. Google managed to delay the launch of some Android phones in China, and some have speculated that the “Android Experience” in China would be crippled if Google apps and services were blocked in China. Case in point, Motorola changed the default search engine from Google to Bing on all Android phones in China.

China is the world’s most populous country and definitely a powerful market for any country. Bloomberg talked to Peter Lui, Google’s former financial controller for Google China and he said “[Google has] burnt bridges and they’ve burnt the Google brand in China. There is no way Google can ever come back.” If he’s right, being banished from the world’s biggest country probably isn’t a good thing, even for the unstoppable Google.