Google Finally Stands Up to the Chicoms

I have lambasted Google in the past for their horrific practice of doing the bidding of the Chinese Communists by censoring articles, words and photographs that the government finds distasteful, such as the photos of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Google thought that making money was much more important than any quibbling over human rights and free speech.

But they quickly changed their tune when the Chicoms, frustrated that Google wouldn’t hand over account holder information on Chinese dissidents who used Gmail, hacked into their corporate offices in an effort to gain access to the information. Now Google is giving the big middle finger to the Chicom government over these actions and want to take off the filters at Google.Cn. They know the Chicoms will shut them down and Google doesn’t care.

From the Google Blog here:

In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.

We have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

We have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

This information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Anyone think Google will actually remove the filters? Or is this all bluster? Is Google big enough now to walk away from a country with a billion users?