US to officially protest Chinese attacks on Google

The recent hacking attacks on the US search engine giant Google hasn't gone down well with the US state department. After Google threatened to pull out of China, the US has officially come to Google's support by deciding to formally protest the hacking attacks and the constant censorship by Beijing's media hostile regime.

"We will be issuing a formal demarche to the Chinese government in Beijing on this issue in the coming days," said US state department spokesperson PJ Crowley. "It will express our concern for this incident and request information from China as to an explanation of how it happened and what they plan to do about it", he added.

Another US giant, Yahoo, is also reported to have been targeted by hackers in China. However, Yahoo has not given any official confirmation of this. This is not the first time that Chinese hackers have given big blows on highly firewalled portals. There have been concrete reports of Chinese hackers breaking in to sensitive data in the PMO (Prime Minister's office) website in India and several other Indian web pages. On almost every occasion, the IP address has been traced to somewhere in China.

Meanwhile, Chinese authorities are infuriated on Google's public acknowledgment of its fears. Google's pull-out threat has even surprised the human rights activists in China, who are working for an 'open Internet' in China. They fear that Google's pull-out will definitely be a blow to their efforts. It is said that it were the Gmail accounts of a few human rights activists that were targeted and it's not that hard to guess who might be behind these hackings.

Now, after the US making its mind to take matters in its own hands, China it finds itself with their backs to the wall. But in typical Chinese fashion, senior authorities there have decided to hit back. An unnamed official quoted by the state news agency Xinhua said only that the authorities were trying to find out more about Google's suggestion. In response to Google's concerns, China has said that foreign internet firms are welcome to do business there "according to the law".

Google currently holds about one-third of the Chinese search market, far behind Chinese rival Baidu, which has more than 60%. Baidu's chief architect Sun Yunfeng claimed that Google was just trying to play down its market failure. He said the American company's move would "satisfy the imagination of those Westerners who have never been to China and understand nothing of China but still like to point fingers at China".