This Tuesday Google threatened to shut down all of their operations in the People’s Republic of China. The reason is that they discovered a very advanced cyber attack against Chinese human rights activists.
According to Google, Chinese “cyber spies” hit the company, along with at least 20 other companies whose identity has not been revealed. The purpose of the attack apparently was to gain access to email accounts belonging to activists all over the world.
The company said that they now are looking over their business in China and that they’ve made the decision to no longer filter search results in China.
Many bloggers claim that Google’s filter in China already is long gone, or at least that it’s gotten a lot softer. When searching for the Tiananmen Square while in China you apparently get a much broader set of results than you used to.
China is still to respond to the threats made by Google. The Chinese authorities are “looking for more information” regarding the alleged attacks, according to a Chinese official.
What can one make out of all this? It’s difficult since Google once in a time agreed to allow very strange censorships, at least according to me, in China but I think it’s a good thing that they now finally decided to take a stand against pointless ruling by “Big Brother”. What do you say? What’s the best thing Google can do now?