March 31, 2010

Disruptions suffered by Google Inc.'s Chinese search service show how vulnerable it remains to the country's Internet police — a threat industry executives said is likely to drive users and advertisers in the mainland away.

Though service resumed Wednesday, many users inside China were unable to search anything for the latter part of Tuesday. Google initially said it was an in-house technical problem but later shifted its explanation, blaming the "Great Firewall" — the nickname for the network of filters that keep mainland Web surfers from accessing material the government deems sensitive.

Whatever the reason, the outage reaffirmed suspicions that China's government would settle scores after a public dispute over censorship prompted Google to shut its mainland-based search engine and move the service to the freer Chinese territory of Hong Kong last week.

"People are going 'Uh-oh, it's begun,'" said T.R. Harrington, chief executive of Shanghai-based Darwin Marketing, which specializes in advertising for China's search engine market. "People just have an expectation that there's going to be some problems based on how Google decided to make its exit and how the government reacted to that."

Chinese departments that monitor the Internet and maintain the network of filters rarely explain disruptions to individual sites and services. The press office at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology declined immediate comment Wednesday on the outage and the possible reasons for it.

Google said it made no fixes or changes on its end to restore service, raising the likelihood that Chinese blocking — not technical glitches within the company — caused the trouble. "We will continue to monitor what is going on, but for the time being this issue seems to be resolved," the Mountain View, California-based company said in a statement.

The sudden disruption and lack of explanation fit with how the government has brought companies to heel previously in the heavily monitored Chinese Internet industry, analysts said.

Source:-http://abcnews.go.com