Google’s embroilment with Chinese authorities is finally coming to a close with it making up its mind to completely shut down its China operations. Google enraged a war against Chinese censorship when it made public its intention to no longer succumb to such online censorship demands of the government.
Google has tried every move in past few months to make Chinese government concede to its demand of internet liberation. It even accused Chinese government of providing support to hackers in stealing of its important Intellectual Property. China in clear words recently stated that Google will get no immunity from its censorship and can proceed with its designated actions.This leaves google with no middle-path but to make good on its earlier promise of ‘No censorship’ issue and finally make an exit from chinese market.
What Google Really wanted to achieve?
Google has long been playing according to China rules in hopes of striking it rich into the world’s fastest growing internet market. It even tried to lure China online users with song search features in order to compete with Baidu – monopolistic search engine in China. Despite such value offerings Google could never made it big into China search market and was languishing at just 17-20 per cent market share.
This ‘No Win’ situation tempted Google to target the censorship issue in order to look morally responsive to people’s demand for online freedom. Google thus tried to leverage the – ‘No Censorship’ Placard to win support of US politicians at the same time force Chinese authorities to take notice of its demand or at least find a middle solution. If China had accepted google’s demand it would have catapulted it to top slot in search engine arena as it would have been conceived as People friendly search engine back there.
Chinese government is widely known for its authoritarian policies and has never in the past succumbed to any MNC’s demand. It also holds Forex reserves of more than $2 tillion (10x total market cap of Google) so thinking that government will change its long standing policy overnight for a minor search engine will be fool’s errand.
So the best possible outcome Google was aiming for was to get little reprieve in censorship for non-offending search terms as also hinted by Eric Schmidt a few days ago so as to get a level-playing field against baidu. This would have also made +ve impact for many of its products like Chrome OS, Android, Corporate Offerings.
Google’s desperate and moral move will now cost it a fortune. Make no Mistake China is now the World’s largest internet market (384 million users) accounting for 1 out of every 4 online audience worldwide. The opportunities of E-Commerce and mobile internet are far more enticing in china than any other BRIC or developing nations .
China’s potential in online advertising and search revenues cannot be equalled by even India which till date is still languishing with it small subscriber base. So after China Exit Google will surely pump enormous resources into countries like India where it is already dominating and will even go for bigger deals ( Youtube- IPL deal was a good example) to quench its thrust for newer markets.
