Google.cn considering closing it's door in China.

The New Approach to China Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer.

Here are some issues involved:

• "In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google."
• "We have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted."
• "We have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective".
• "We have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties"

For a complete article, please read it here.

And a follow up post "Keeping your data safe" by Dave Girouard, Google Enterprise. This is to give us assurance that Google Apps and customer data were not affected by this incident.

Do you think Google.cn will let it go? As of this time, "Baidu had about 64% of China's search engine revenue at the end of the third quarter, compared with 31% for Google, according to estimates by research firm Analysis International" (2010, WSJ.com)

Do you think Bing/Yahoo will jump in?