Google Inc. is in the eye of a storm, as it’s subsidiary Google China antagonized the interest of the Chinese Government. On March 22, 2010, Google began redirecting all google.cn traffic to google.com.hk (Google Hong Kong), thereby bypassing Chinese regulators and allowing uncensored simplified Chinese search results. Prior to 2006, Google.com was accessible in the country. In 2005, a chinese language interface was developed for google.com. Google China was established in 2006, but much of its content was not accessible due to censorship. On January 12, 2010, Google announced that it was “no longer willing to continue censoring” results on Google.cn.

Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region in China with a high level of freedom of speech and expression, and  google.com.hk does not censor search results, making it more effective for networking and sharing information with Internet users in mainland China. Redirecting google.cn to google.com.hk thus leads to the availability of uncensored search results to the people of mainland China. “While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission,” a statement by the internet giants said. It is believed that this could be the beginning of the end of the Google brand in China. However, the shutdown of Google China would not significantly affect Google Inc., as it is only a very small subsidiary. Also, Google China has a market share of only 29%, according to Analysys International. Baidu.com is the leading search engine in the most populous conuntry in the world.

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