China not Willing to Budge from its Stance on Internet Censorship, Google Pullout Likely
It seems that neither Google nor the Chinese government are going to budge. Chinese government is not at all ready to compromise on its Internet censorship policies.
However, there is a flipside too. Now, Chinese companies cannot advertise on the Google website which is also increasing the dilemma for the Chinese Government as it will lose a lot of revenue if Google decides to pull their Chinese unit. Earlier, Google had announced that it will concretize their plans and the pull out will take place on April 10th as reported by Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, partners of Google Inc. asked for clear cut approach on this issue as the Chinese Government and Google itself have been dilly-dallying for the past two months. Neither was ready to reveal anything. According to Reuters, a letter from Google’s 27 authorized sales representative companies outlines that they do not like the dilemma that is present at this time and this has caused business to slide which has made them abstain from further investments.
The letter has also asked Google to inform its pre-paid advertisers, employees and companies of compensation if and when Google closes its chapter in China. Now the biggest gainer of a Google shutdown will be Chinese search engine Baidu. Google’s one third market share will be gobbled up by Baidu. However, this will mean that any other foreign Internet company will abstain from coming to China and do business with them.
Meanwhile, there are other little battles here and there that Google has to face. Firstly, the copyright controversy with Viacom has once again raised its ugly head. In 2007, Viacom had given a show cause notice to Gogle on why it used Viacom TV networks 100,000 video clips on the YouTube. There is more that meets the eye in this case as court documents proves many false allegations.
In 2006, Viacom had tried to buy YouTube, however, it Google proved to be smarter and outbid it, thus acquiring the site for US$1.65 billion. It is speculated that Viacom employees and its partners had on purpose posted a number of clips on the YouTube. However, Viacom has claimed that YouTube is a safe haven for people who can intentionally violate the copyrighted material to increase its number of hits. The battle lines are drawn out and it’s likely that a revenue-sharing agreement might be reached between the two companies.
