So Google moved its servers from mainland China to Hong Kong earlier this week, and continues providing services to users in mainland China. I heard cheers for Google’s move, and I also heard mocking voice. One of my clients wrote to me and asked for information - recently he has been planning to launch a new Google Ads campaign for his food distribution business in China. I told the customer to put his money back into his pocket for a while.
Google’s biggest move is to stop self-censoring its web search results, as it agreed when it negotiated with the Chinese government years ago. Some of Google's other services such as YouTube, Sites and Blogger are totally blocked and Docs, Picasa and Groups are partially blocked for a long time ago.
Google may win applaud from some human rights and free speech advocates, but I do worry about what it may cause to the investors. The day when Google redirect its google.cn domain to google.hk, many more search results appearing in the list, some of those were not accessible in the past in mainland China.
David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, in his announcement said that Google was aware that this move could piss off Chinese government and Google.hk could be blocked any time. Google even made a new page to offers a summary of Google service availability in China: www.google.com/prc/report.html
Consequences? Of course, Baidu will take more of Google's market shares, some confidence may lost for Google, more and more SEO experts will pay more attention to Baidu and other Chinese local search engines. If Google is title wiped out of mainland China, online marketing would be totally restructured, for some method and approaches need to change.
But I can assure you that this is not the end, so what will happen? My guess there could three endings:
1. Chinese government blocks Google web search service, as the response Google totally withdraw from mainland China, all services are suspended.
2. Chinese government blocks Google web search totally, Google withdraw from mainland China, but only operate AdSense in Chinese market.
3. Google keeps operating through Hong Kong, but China will temporarily block it when a user search a sensitive key phrase like "Tiananmen square protest", but this won't affect our main business, for most of the pages are still accessible.
I believe No.3 has the biggest chance to happen, so Chinese government does not have to take full responsibility of driving Google out, and Google can keep most of its business; it is very unusual if the Chinese government does nothing about it. But before everything is getting clear, I will suggest you do nothing but wait and see.
