Pretty frightening that they need to reiterate this (they mentioned this in the original announcement):
<i>Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them. Despite all the uncertainty and difficulties they have faced since we made our announcement in January, they have continued to focus on serving our Chinese users and customers. We are immensely proud of them.</i>
IMO, the most valuable thing to come out of all of this is the China apps status dashboard:<p><a href="http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en</a><p>tells us what China is currently allowing, blocking, or partially blocking.
It is possible the Chinese government will only partially block google.com.hk. This it how it has often worked with Wikipedia. You can browse the site, but as soon as any forbidden phrase is passed over the TCP connection it is cut. Then all access to the site from your IP is blocked for a while. This makes the service very intermittent, and makes it difficult for users to distinguish between censorship and overloaded servers. There is also the question of what will happen to the google.cn domain, as all websites in China are required to have an ICP license from a government agency.
<i>"It's entirely legal ... We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision"</i><p>Not much of a leg to stand on. I wouldn't want to be a Google employee in China right now.
That's actually brilliant. They're both complying with the letter of the law and forcing the Chinese government to actively shut them down. I hope all their non-Chinese employees have exited the country...
Some things I used to be able to search for on google.cn, but are now filtered by my ISP (via connection reset):<p><a href="http://www.google.com.hk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=六四" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com.hk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...</a> (6/4)<p><a href="http://www.google.com.hk/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q=天安门+1989" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com.hk/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q...</a> (Tian'anmen 1989)<p>I'm sure a native Chinese can give a better list. Superficially at least, it looks like ISP level censorship has gotten worse.
And all this time analysts were saying Google would stand down from its principles on this matter. I quite like this page: <a href="http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en</a> as well as the general tenor of these actions.
I have some colleagues and good friends in Beijing, most of them coming from various provinces to Beijing for their jobs - they are not high up in the ladder socio-economically. The impression I get is that they love China (to the extent of choosing not to go abroad to live and work), but resent the party's overbearing ways. They are not going to go out and protest, but that doesn't mean they like their government much either. They tell me banned publications are fairly widely available, if you know how to find them, and many of them are fairly knowledgeable about stuff the party doesn't want them to know about.
Could this be the first big salvo in a protectionist effort against Chinese imports? It certainly provides some political cover for the Treasury to declare CN a currency manipulator in the next couple of weeks.<p>Are there any projections out there of how tariffs would affect technology the markets?
<a href="http://www.google.cn" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.cn</a> now redirects to <a href="http://www.google.com.hk/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com.hk/</a>, and there is a line of message saying <i>欢迎您来到谷歌搜索在中国的新家</i>, which means "Welcome to the new home for Google Search in China".
Whatever this leads Google needs to stay in China even if they ban it in Hong Kong.<p>Supposedly one of the reasons Google's stand has been so "principled" is because of Sergey Brin's early years in the Soviet Union.<p>That begs the question though, if the Soviet Union had Google and the internet would it have collapsed sooner or would it have taken longer?
I think it is funny that I am visiting China right now and I cannot see the article because googleblog.blogspot.com is blocked. I'll have to bookmark it to be read when I get back home.
I haven't seen anyone mention, how long it'll take for China to ban Google from Hong Kong. I understand it runs the place already (indirectly maybe), sure they'll have to change laws, but I haven't gotten the impression that that's an obstacle.