Should Google Exit China? Sound Off Here…

Google announced that it was considering leaving China over cyber-attacks on the email accounts of human rights activists that use its computers there. The threat from China’s #2 most used search engine (#1 being Baidu, which has been much more amenable to the Chinese government’s censorship demands) comes as Google announced it was ending self-censorship of its search engine. Previously blocked searches, such as references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre or details about President Obama’s recent town hall meeting in Shanghai, were now available on Google.cn, though it likely won’t take long for the Chinese government to step in.

Google’s exit will essentially make internet search a monopoly in China. Granted this is barely worse than the duopoly that currently exists, as Baidu maintains a 60% market share in the world’s largest internet-using country by creating knock-off websites of Wikipedia and Myspace. And other prominent US search engines such as MSN and Yahoo essentially left China over its censorship policies while Google took a lot of heat in 2000 for choosing to remain there. Google chose to self-censor information, a policy that many human rights activists said went against Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” How does that reconcile with Google’s current threats to pull out? Isn’t some access to information better than no access? Will Google’s departure kill internet innovation in China by allowing a monopoly to exist, and that too with a company that is in lockstep with the Chinese government?

Sound off here by leaving a comment…