Money smells

People are pulled to the Beijing Office of Google, leave flowers and farewell notes. The reason is the conflict between the world's largest Internet search engine and the China government. So far, however, nothing irreparable happened: the Internet giant only canceled the self-censorship on the local portal Google.cn. Now the search engine in communist China, where censorship and rigid monitoring of the media and the Internet are preserved, will freely issue information about independent Taiwan, the release of Tibet and Chinese human rights organizations. Filtering of content was the initial condition for entering the Chinese market in 2005 - then Google agreed to such rules of the game. But now the situation has changed, and the China will not go to the backward authorities, which they have already officially announced. However, from the very beginning, Google did not have special illusions about this - on January 13, the company announced that it was ready to go to the end and close Chinese offices. The reason was a well -prepared hacker attack from Chinese territory, aimed exclusively to the mailboxes of local human rights defenders. The attack is so professional that the hand of special services is easily guessed behind it. This was the last straw, after which Google said that they would no longer censor their own search engine. Google joined the battle with the Chinese government, counting on the support of colleagues from Microsoft and Yahoo (at the end of 2008, three companies signed a common set of business rules in countries where they limit freedom of speech). But Microsoft has already stated that the rich Chinese market is not ready to leave the Yahoo reputation in this sense for a long time is soaked: in 2002 and 2005, the search engine revealed the names of the “cyberDissants” to the Chinese authorities, after which the journalists of Shi Tao and Van Xiaonin received large prison terms. The inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom know their power well, and therefore flowers at the door of the Google office - farewell to your favorite search engine.