Google to End Chinese Censorship Cooperation

<3 Google today.

Read this article on Mashable. Basically, Google had been complying with China's search censorship requests, and had taken a lot of heat for it. And then "sophisticated attacks on the Gmail accounts of Chinese human activists" forced Google to change its mind. Read the article if you want the story, but I want to talk about why Google was smart from start to end on this.

1. Google gave China a chance.
There's no legitimate "Oh, Google are being xenophobic anti-Chinese" excuses that can be used. Google opened the door, China closed it.

2. Cyberwarfare is a serious issue that is overlooked by many.
Countries around the world are ramping up cyber military groups to do infrastructure attacks on the Internet. We've seen it from North Korea, China, Eastern Europe, Russia, and other locations. A year or so ago, we saw the web take a huge hit due to essentially DNS faking that disrupted the greater Indian subcontinent. Spam, sabotage (both military and industrial) and spying are rampant. The media's not talking about it. Companies and governments want to pretend it doesn't exist. Fortunately, America's had an official government unit for years, and under Obama, America's anti-cyber-terrorism effort is being expanded. Google making this move based on the cyber attacks is a strong message about the seriousness of the issue, as well as the obvious government-backing of them. This alone is going to piss off China's leaders a lot.

3. Google got penetration into China.
If China pulls the plug on Google, people will notice. They also set the standard for speed and quality of searches. If China had never gotten Google in the first place, China's own search services would have ruled.

My estimate is that the Chinese government knows that they realize censorship is, at best, a temporary solution. If they don't realize this, they're blind idiots and are in store for a revolution. However, I don't think they're dumb. Dumb people can't rule over more than a billion people for very long. I think that they are trying to evolve their economy as rapidly as possible while they hold the dam, and by the time that censorship has to end, standard of living will have risen to a level high enough where its citizens won't demand revolution. At the least, it's a slow change and current politicians won't have to deal with it. At best, they are a slowly evolving dragon.