Back in January of this year when the news that Google was thumbing its nose at China under the pretense of some fight against censorship I wrote here
This is all a game between Google and China. China stole some property. Google notices and after digging up some additional juicy garbage puts the spotlight on China. Google and China begin talking in the back room and chances are some money (a lot of money) will change hands. Google will go back to censoring filtering search results. Everyone is happy.
Well as everyone now knows Google, with a whole lotta spin doctoring, announced that they were returning to China. It turns out that their plan to subvert China’s censorship laws by redirecting mainland Chinese users to the Google search page on their Hong Kong site didn’t go over well with the Chinese government – well DUH!
So with their Internet Content Provider License (ICP), a requirement of the Chinese government, in possible jeopardy if they kept up with this ploy Google has backtracked and is now serving up content hosted from within China (another requirement to keep their ICP) and just offering a link to the uncensored version on their Hong Kong site.
This is pretty much what I figured would happen when Google made a big show of their pull out after all their is just way too much money at stake. So as usual money trumps ethics but that as well should come as no surprise.
