From overseas press

Google defeated fairly, Times columnist said

(chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-01-29 11:36

In most Western versions, Google is described as a guardian of Western values such as the freedom of speech and the right to know, while China’s censorship and monitoring of the Web is portrayed as a violation of those freedoms.

However, Zachary Karabell, columnist for Time.com, reveals another version of the story. In his article, he refuted two of Google's excuses about its failure in China, and implied an ongoing shift of world economic balance.

On the first point, Google blamed business losses on China's Internet monitoring policies. But Karabell indicates it is forceful competition that is pushing Google out of China's market.

"Google has not been doing all that well in China, as many have noted in recent days, badly trailing the domestic Chinese search company Baidu," Karabell commented on Time.com. Karabell said Yahoo and eBay also failed to take root in the soil of China's information economy, he said. Yahoo was defeated by native-born Alibaba.com, and eBay was defeated by China's Taobao, he wrote.

Karabell said that these companies have a distinct advantage over foreign competitors because their founders and senior managers are more familiar with the domestic political and civil environment, and the needs of native Internet users.

The second reason cited by Google for its concerns about China was its announcement that it was attacked by coordinated hackers originated from China. As Karabell said on Time.com, 'Other countries also engage in cyber espionage, especially Israel and, of course, the US government itself, with the largest group of hackers in the world employed by the National Security Agency.' But only in China does this creates much of a furor, he wrote.

Still, the author pointed out, Google denies that it may be to blame for the failure, and also might be concealing the shifting balance of economic power globally.

"China's efforts to censor and monitor the Web represent a challenge to the uncontested hegemony of Western business and the dominance of Silicon Valley in the world of new technologies," Karabell wrote.

That's why Google and its US boss are making a mountain out of a molehill in China. Their target might not be its monitoring policies, but China's rising power in Internet technology and the economy.