The Impact of Google’s Exit from China
The Great retreat of super search engine Google from China is bound to cause a few concerns and perhaps a large change to the face of the internet. China boasts a prior to the buzz around the exit of Google from China, a few security concerns surfaced. The Major one being Google seize on censoring the Chinese search engine Google.cn after it discovered evidence hackers inside China were targeting the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights dissidents and some 20 Chinese and international companies.
The reaction from Google executives seemed to be that of people who have of given up. The Vice President of Google, David Drummond, refused to speculate whether the Chinese government was behind the attacks. He said Google might have to pull all of its operations out of China as they simply cannot continue to operate a filtered or search engine.
While Google is not the largest search engine in that country its ability to index and search through millions of Chinese websites opens that country’s digital borders to the world. Blocking Google from indexing those sites would effectively create a bubble around China and hinder international access to one of the fastest growing economies on the planet.
According to Mr. Rohozinski, the impact is as follows: "Basically the business model that has allowed companies like Google to exist, which is a global unified unfettered Internet cloud, will be replaced by national Internet clouds or clouds that belong to coalitions of countries which decide who and who cannot access resources from within those clouds”. The most important statement He made was "They are radically altering the entire structure of cyberspace."
Mr Rafal Rohozinski, the chief executive of Ottawa’s SecDev Group, has been consulting with Google since it was discovered that numerous systems within the company had been hacked by Chinese-based attackers.
What does this mean to the ordinary man? Well the greatest concern surrounds the millions of Gmail accounts, not just in China, but world wide. 20 companies in China were hacked and information in email accounts corrupted, stolen and deleted. This begs the question of the users trust in Google, if there private information and data is secure and safe. Perhaps Google will be able to answer these pressing questions sooner than later.
By: Singatha Hlazo
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