HausArbeitPodcast

My podcast is about the current Google China incident. Just like any other large IT company, Google faces cyber attacks on a regular basis but a few weeks ago a highly sophisticated attack originating from China was launched against the search engine and its business infrastructure. Other companies, mostly US based ones, were also impacted but Google suffered the greatest damage. Their investigation showed that several email accounts were hacked and accessed by third parties. Furthermore all of the effected accounts have one thing in common: they all belong to human rights advocates working in China. There seems to be evidence that the attacks were coordinated or at least sanctioned by official Chinese authorities.

Google is also active in the Chinese search engine market but other than in the US or the EU they only have a 30% market share in China, the rest being occupied by a search engine named Baidu run by a sole Chinese company.

Internet access in China is subject to heavy censorship, for example all information about the Tienanmen massacre is not accessible from within China and even a foreign Company like Google has to comply to these censorship laws.

It now seems to happen that Google is about to withdraw from the Chinese market due to both the attacks on their infrastructure and the various violations of human rights by the Chinese government. If this is really going to happen it will put a lot of political and economic pressure on China to either condemn the attacks and release their grip on the internet or to lose a big investor like Google due to their own misbehavior.

Critics, on the other hand, are now warning that a withdrawal will possibly change nothing in the fields of human rights because Googles move may look like extortion to the Chinese government.

Either way this incident is one of the first where a global company with all its own economic power stands up against a government and hopes are at high that it will pave the way for Chinese citizens to get unfettered free access to the information they desire, even if it comes to dark moments in their history like Tienanmen.