1 | Beijing
Goodbye, Google?
Google appears ready to leave China and its more than 380 million Internet users behind. When the search giant launched a local service in China in 2006, it agreed to censor query results on controversial terms like Tibet--while reserving the right to alert users that it was doing so. Initially sanguine, Beijing began to add restrictions in 2009. Tensions reached a breaking point in January after a China-based cyberattack on Gmail. Google then vowed to stop self-censoring--a move that, according to a Beijing spokesman on March 12, would have "consequences." Ironically, those consequences might be gravest...