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Google Buzz As China Play. Is Google REALLY Raising The Stakes?

By Dan Harris and Steve Dickinson

For many reasons, we have so far pretty much stayed away from the Google-China kerfuffle. The most important reason for our not writing about it is that we simply do not see ourselves as having anything new or noteworthy to add to the debate. That has not really changed in that about all I am doing today is cribbing from a really thought provoking Absurdity, Allegory and China (AAC) post, entitled, "Google Buzz and China." So why now and why that post? Well, that post posits that Google has debuted Buzz now as a bargaining chip in dealing with the Chinese government. Buzz is, right now, pretty much the only major Western social networking platform with a nice channel into China. Now I have no idea what Google's intent was in putting Buzz live when it did, and I do not even really much care. But what I do care about and is another point AAC raises, which is that if Google refuses to uncouple Buzz from Gmail and if China refuses to back down on its restrictive policy on Western social networking sites, Gmail end up, shall we say, losing its way in China, and that would be a huge deal. It would be a huge deal because almost without exception, every ex-pat in China uses gmail in one capacity or another. Google in China just got a little more interesting. What do you think? Comment Warning. If you use words in your comments that could trigger bad things, I will change them.

Full post as published by China Law Blog on February 17, 2010 (boomark / email).