In these days Google announced that it had stopped censoring search results on its China portal, Google.cn, and was automatically redirecting its users to Google.com.hk, an uncensored portal in Hong Kong. This means that Google won’t cooperate in China’s policy of censoring World Wide Web. Responses to described above around the globe were different but mostly critics have applied to political connotation of the issue. But there is another thing worth considering when re-thinking described problematic. I thing that China, is evidently blocking most popular western sites in order to cement domestic businesses in the market. China has the ability and has used it in the past to block specific sites based on content, and it has blocked specific YouTube and Facebook sites since they went online. Yet only recently have they blocked such sites wholesale. The reason for that is gaining market share against local competitors like Youku. There are now domestic Chinese equivalents of all these “western” sites—Baidu for Google, Taobao for eBay, Renren for Facebook, QQ for instant messaging, games and social networking—and they are doing well (see chart attached).

In Chinese case we can see that all major www companies have their equivalents and are therefore replaceable. This case is also a good proof that global enterprises such as Google in the issues of defining reality as well as in the power of censorship aren’t above national states (at least not in Chinese case). Google’s decision to remove their portal from China to Hong Kong can also be a result of poor management and expected outcome. In China Google pledged to get 24 billion of revenue but so far they succeeded to create only 250 to 600 $ million outcome. Another aspect of transferring their portal to location outside of China is for sure political. Political results of this action are yet to be seen and very interesting to follow and analyze.