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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Google Now Essentially Shut Down In China

Courtesy of Tyler Durden

China is now playing hardball, and this is even without Paul Krugman being in the picture (yet). The WSJ reports that China has now blocked virtually “all searches by Chinese users on Google Inc. sites Tuesday, sharply escalating the battle with the U.S. Internet giant a week after it stopped obeying Beijing’s censorship rules.” This is hardly unexpected, yet what it means is that just as the US stock market will now be defined by QQQQ, C, BOFA and now APPL, as consumers decide against paying their mortgage and reroute their meager unemployment checks into advance orders for the iPad, so the Shanghai Composite will be determined solely by BIDU.

From the WSJ:

Users in cities across China starting late Tuesday afternoon reported that all searches—even of terms as mundane as “happy”—on Google’s Hong Kong site produced an error message saying the results page couldn’t be opened. Google stopped operating its self-censored Chinese search site on March 22 and began routing Chinese users to the Hong Kong site, which Google doesn’t censor. Searches by Chinese users on Google’s main global site, Google.com, also returned error messages Tuesday.

Users in some cities said they couldn’t access Google.cn, the mainland Chinese Web address Google has long used, which since last week has automatically sent users to the Hong Kong site. Google’s music search service also appeared to be inaccessible.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the disruption would be permanent. China’s Internet censorship regime, unofficially known as the Great Firewall, is opaque and unpredictable and officials almost never discuss its workings. Wang Lijian, spokesman for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, one of China’s main Internet regulators, said he was unaware of any disruption. A Google spokeswoman declined to immediately comment.

This is nothing more than the first shots in a full blown trade war. Next up: multinationals whose revenue comes in big part from China will, just like in the case of Obama’s healthcare reform, start announcing mysterious “one-time” charges associated with doing business in Mainland China.

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