Google set to leave China over censorship

According to media reports, Google is set to terminate its presence in China, after the world’s largest search engine failed to comply with Chinese laws requiring the censorship of its web content. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google may close the Chinese branch of its company within a matter of weeks, after it was unable to reach a deal with officials at China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Google announced earlier this year that it would no longer filter search results on its Chinese site, in order to adhere to the communist country’s stiff censorship of web content. Ministry officials, however, were quick to warn that if Google did not filter out material that the state found objectionable, the firm would “have to bear the consequences” for its “irresponsible” decision. The most damaging end result for Google would be its removal from a country, which has more than 400 million internet users and therefore represents the world’s largest market for online content.

More than 250,000 people join China’s rapidly growing community of internet users every day and despite this massive audience, this promising online market has virtually no international players when it comes to search engine technology. Google currently controls approximately 36% of the country’s search traffic and revenue, but it faces competition from Baidu, a local Chinese firm offering a search engine closely modeled off of western pioneers, such as Google, Yahoo and Alta Vista. Baidu controls 58% of China’s search revenue. If Google closes its Chinese business in the coming weeks, the world’s largest country will either offer a world of possibilities for another major western internet company to launch a search tool, or will expedite the development of an alternative, filtered internet system based exclusively on local companies, and often referred to as the “Chinternet.”