The rumor I've heard here in Beijing is that, among other things, the Chinese government was interested in the actual search-engine tech to help fuel their own CCTV search engine (which is to eventually be expanded beyond video search). Baidu is not considered friendly enough to government policies, so they want to spin their own version.

Just a rumor, but it doesn't sound too outlandish to me.

(An interesting and tangential question is how good could a state-run search engine be? My personal belief is that they could make it pretty good if they really focused on it (consider, for example, the Soviet Union and the nuclear arms race)).

There was an aborted attempt at a German/French initiative that was supposed to become the de-facto search engine for the European Union.

I personally don't think a state run search engine stands even a tiny chance.

Presumably the Germans / French had a lot less to lose with a failed search engine, whereas the Chinese stand to lose control of the next medium of communication.

I'm sure in the minds of many of the people planning this, the idea is that the internet is just the latest iteration of communication technology (like the newspaper, TV, etc), and as such the government should have a significant presence there in the same way as it does with The People's Daily and CCTV.

Ah, sorry, you're absolutely right. I watched the movie in German, never for a second thought they would have translated the title for the English release.

It's pretty obvious they would have translated the title too.

How on earth did that comment end up here ? it was supposed to go below a completely different one...

Unclear from that article how much of the JP Morgan estimate of $600 million/year revenue to Google from China is from ads sold on Google and viewed in China (.cn/.com) and how much from sales to Chinese advertisers viewed anywhere on Google. Revenue from the latter case isn't likely to suffer from a pullout.

The typical argument is that China cannot resist the money. But, to be a devil's advocate here, perhaps they think that it's MORE risky to their business to stay in China. That is, someone was trying to steal their technology. If someone got their hands on their secret sauce algorithms that would surely put the business, as a whole, at risk considering it's their one real moneymaker.

I have very mixed feelings about that. It's good when such a big company takes those measures. But in the end it will harm google more then it will do good, as no other company will follow.

And Chinas government may be very happy, the got rid of _the_ source for political information for the people and now can work further on controlling the rest.

If Google quits, they will no longer be subject to Chinese law, which will open up all sorts of possibilities.

What sort of possibilities? I'm running some sites on Google's AppEngine, and recently found out that it is blocked due to the GFW. I don't see any signs of that changing, especially with this new policy.

Can anyone confirm that AppEngine does not work right now in mainland China? I've been thinking about moving to China for a while now and this would be yet another reason to stall on that decision. I know I can VPN out for Twitter / FB / Google, but that just seems such a hassle for an internet professional.

AppEngine is not blocked from here... What is bloked in China is google group and some parts of google code (sigh)...

For accessing any website, I just use a ssh tunnel to a vps in the US and have almost no loss of speed or latency when reaching US websites... So it's really not a bother...

If you have any questions on living in China, you can get in touch with me, my email is in my profile...

I was thinking they could play an active role in smuggling information into China, for instance.

Google Chine _the_ source of political information for the people? Why on earth do you think this?

If you didn't know: Google is all about finding, sharing and publishing information.

The Chinese Government control information flow in China. It is how the Government works. Google can do business in China in other ways they sell advertising for searches done outside of China on Google and they can create hardware devices to sell in China. But trying to distribute information in China or being a source of finding information in China is probably not as great of a business plan as say selling cars in China. Making and selling cars doesn't doesn't really bother the government too much.

> _the_ source for political information for the people and now can work further on controlling the rest.

It never got control. Chinese people love gossip and rumors. The govn't just do not want anyone to discuss stuff 'publicly'.

"An exit from the world’s biggest Internet market would cost Google, whose sales growth slowed during the U.S. recession, $600 million in revenue, according to estimates by JPMorgan Chase & Co."

On the other hand, I wonder how much it's costing them. Once you add in all the costs of filtering the Chinese searches, I could see them not making as much profit as you'd expect. But this is sheer conjecture on my part. It's also possible that Google's bluffing.

this article by WSJ is more insightful: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870344710457511...

The problem with the link is it's behind a subscriber paywall. In this case, I'm not even going to go through the trouble of using Google News first click to read it. I've gotten the news through many other resources.

I have no doubt that Goog will continue to operate in China. At the end of the day, there's way too much money on the table to do something as drastic as that.

One other article I read indicated that it was only the search engine itself they were looking to shut down, and not other operations. If that is the case, I'd be sorely disappointed in Google.