Google's dispute with China

Google just reported several extremely interesting things:

• China launched a targeted and sophisticated attack against Google’s infrastructure (emphasis mine). I dare to speculate that China is following Russia’s lead in creating a highly qualified cyber-warfare unit and is not shy in using it.

• Google (apart from posting it to the public) claims to have reported this to US authorities. These have traditionally ignored cyberterrorism. However this seems to be the clearest case of government endorsed attack to date. Lets hope that the US chooses to do something.

• Google decided to revert it’s controversial decision to censor it’s Chinese results. This is clearly a retribution of some sort. Google also writes that it is prepared to leave China for good - clearly a statement of not being threatened. It is also quite a powerful threat.

Imagine if Google suddenly stopped working. I presume since you are reading this blog you would be fine. But there are millions of users for whom Google is the internet. Plus a lot of Chinese users (probably including government officials) would loose their Gmail data and their calendars.

I imagine China is facing a tough decision with this.