Google has threatened to shut down its operations in China after a series of cyber attacks on the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
The search engine giant said the attacks, coupled with continued attempts to limit free speech on Google.cn have “led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China”.
Google added that it was “no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn”, and revealed plans to hold talks with the Chinese government over its future in China.
Google detected a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” last month which originated from China, and resulted in the theft of intellectual property from the search engine, according to Google’s corporate development and chief legal officer David Drummond.
It later transpired that the attack was not limited to Google, but infiltrated 20 other large companies from a wide range of businesses – including the internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors.
Google is currently notifying the companies concerned and said that it is working with US authorities.
Mr Drummond added that Google had evidence to suggest that the primary goal of the cyber attacks was to access the Google email, or ‘Gmail’, accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
However, “based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective”, Mr Drummond wrote in Google’s official blog.
Google took the unusual step of publicly announcing the attack because “this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech”.
It conceded that China is a “great nation…at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today”.
However, the attack on Google was “something quite different” to the usual cyber attacks the search engine faces, Mr Drummond said, admitting that it “may well mean having to shut down Google.cn and potentially our offices in China”.
“The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences”, he said.
“Over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.”
In an apparent attempt to shield Google’s employees in China from possible repercussions, Mr Drummond added: “We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China.”
Although the Chinese website Baidu eclipses Google’s small share of the search engine market in China, analysts say pulling out of China would hit Google’s bottom line.
Google.cn generates 8 to 10 percent of the company’s revenues, analysts told Reuters.
However, Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China, said it was a wake-up call, exposing the risks of doing business in China.
“The tendency has been for companies to keep their eye just on the benefits of doing business. But the risks are real – the risks are to our intellectual property. The risks are to our values,” she told Reuters.
