The official in charge of the Internet bureau under the State Council Information Office told the Xinhuanet.com that Google had “violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks”.

The official added that Google’s move was totally wrong and that China opposed the politicization of commercial issues and expressed discontent to “to Google for its unreasonable accusations and conducts”.

Google had been in talks with Chinese officials before to resolve the issue without having to pull out of China completely. The current move can be seen as a compromise between pulling out completely and continuing to censor search results and other services in China.

The official did not reveal China’s reaction to Google’s move. It is likely that additional Google services will be blocked in China. Google has created a Google China Service Availability information page where users from all over the world can see which Google services are blocked in China. The page however has not been updated since March 21.

The google.cn domain has been redirected to google.com.hk, the Google Search engine of Hong Kong. Users from Chinese mainland are automatically redirected to the Hong Kong search engine which is displayed in simplified Chinese to them.

Google mentioned further that they will carefully monitor the situation as it can very well be that the Chinese government decides to block access to the Google search engine and other Google services in the future.

Users from all over the world can take a look at the new Google China Service Availability page that displays status information about Google Services in China. It will in particular tell visitors if Google services such as Google Search, Youtube, Gmail, Blogger or Picasa are accessible, blocked or partially blocked.

The Google service availability page will be updated daily to reflect changes in the availability. It is interesting that Google decided to go forward with it as it surely means that they will lose some money and probably even access to the Chinese market completely.

What’s your opinion on the matter? Good or bad move by Google?

This incident “combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web” have led Google to conclude that they should review their business operations in China. “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China” says David Drummond, SVP, Google’s Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer.

Is Google really going all or nothing in China? Not really. Google explicitly stated that they will have talks with the Chinese government about this which means that they are willing to negotiate. It is also clear that Google does not have a problem with censorship if you look at Google’s search engines in other countries.

The reason for Google is that they are only number two in the search engine market in China. Baidu is first there and offering music downloads as well albeit without a similar deal. The reason why the Music Industry agreed to the deal is simple: Money. The majority of Chinese do not pay for music but download it from the Internet. And so it was decided that sharing some advertising revenue with Google is better than fighting illegal music downloads.

Google is restricting file downloads to Chinese users according to Mashable who were the first to publish the story. The search interface on the other hand is available for everyone.

Definitely an interesting progression especially for Chinese users who can now download music legally while everyone else in the world cannot.