Google and China were opposing forces in terms of political ideas and the idea of free speech. China was very against all sorts of political ideas or the new-fangled revolutions that came from the West, therefore they constantly blocked out many Western sites and its content to its Chinese people. Many website developers labelled this move as the “Great Firewall of China”, according to a New York Times article written by Clive Thompson. When Yahoo! first tried to offer its search engine to the Chinese, they were not prepared for the differences that the Chinese and the Americans have, therefore they lost out to the local search engines, even though their technology was far superior than the Chinese. Google, armed with Yahoo!’s failure in the Chinese market, tried instead to target the cosmopolitans in China, those who wanted to be like the Westerners. Before long, Google had commanded 25 per cent of the search traffic in China. However, in 2002, China had blocked Google in their country. Why was that so? One theory given by Clive Thompson was that China had not wanted to block Google entirely because it was so popular. However, the sites that China banned can be seen in Google. This means that the public can see that the website online, but will know that China had blocked the website.
What changed the Chinese government’s mind to ban Google? Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google told Clive Thompson that the “block might have been at the instigation of a competitor, which many analysts say that it was Baidu, which when Google was online, had only less than 3 percent of the market share of searches in China. Google then had to set up an office in China and operate under China’s special censorship laws in order to maintain business in China. This example was to highlight the fact that Google could not spread its ideas of free speech and a free Internet to China, hereby dismissing the notion that Google has influenced the world. By setting up an office in China so that they can operate means that they have given up the fight and instead compromised on their own beliefs, which did not went well with many people back in the United States, where Google fans believed that Google should always be for the user, not for the profits.
