The Real Reason Google is Pulling Out of China?

I had written previously here about Google’s righteous indignation at how the Chinese had hacked their Gmail accounts to scrape information on dissidents and internal corporate secrets and how Google vowed to GTFO of China. Suddenly Google was sick of China’s censorship policies even though they knew what those policies were when they began their ventures there. They vowed to shutter Google.CN.

There is a Reuters story here about how China is accusing Google of simply backing down on their own commitments in the pending shutdown of Google.CN. But is the real reason why they are shutting down simply because they got their asses kicked in the market by Baidu? And does blaming Chinese hackers allow them to back out of a market without looking like their search engine is not the best?

Joseph Evers of EncyclopediaDramatica thinks so, and I must admit his theory looks pretty good to me. He wrote on the ED blog during the Aboriginal article scandal:

The “Aboriginal” article was recently removed from Google Australia’s search engine results. This was right after Google had done a large amount of grandstanding about fighting Chinese censorship. Which proves they’re a bunch of spineless hypocrites. Really, you have to admire the shrewdness of Google. China was a gigantic business failure, and a loss leader. With a bunch of CIA and shareholder money Google went in promising that their search technology was really so much better that the Chinese market would fall in a fortnight. Years and what is likely billions later, Baidu completely dominates the Chinese search market. By spinning an obvious business failure as a failure of RED POLITICS Google was able to pull out of China without losing face. Their idiot shareholders sat there and applauded them for wasting billions of their money. For that I give Google a lot of respect. They are some of the most brilliant marketers around, but as anyone who has used Google’s ad placement can attest, the only thing they really excel at selling is themselves.

So if you hear Google touting how they are fighting censorship, remember that they are the world leader in Censorship. Maybe they are finding out that censorship is bad business, but make no mistake. Business failure in China is why Google is getting out of China.