In it’s strongest protest against the Chinese government yet, Google threatened to pull out of China amidst an alleged hacking attempt made on it’s US based Gmail servers by Chinese government backed hackers (apparently to hack into Chinese human right activists’ Gmail accounts). This is one of the most defiant moves by any US corporation against the Chinese communist government yet.

From what can be read from Google’s SVP and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond’s recent online post, Google seems pretty serious about pulling out of China completely.

“We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China,” the posting stated.

His post continued with, “these attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

If the Chinese government is proven to be the ones responsible behind this illegal and unethical attack, it would be indeed a sad day for China. It is a pity that the Chinese government is short sighted in the way it attempts to create boundaries even where there are none – on the web.

Well done Google – Do No Evil!

This article was contributed by guest writer Ameet Arurkar.