Besides, if you need to kick someone’s ass, do it to the ones that are responsible for censorship in the first place – the Chinese government.

Wrong. Google.com, by Google’s own estimates, was up 90% of the time for users from China.

Now you can run into details, like some smart kids using proxies, but you have to remember that most people don’t know how to use proxies, and that proxies can be blocked too.

To do business in China results in compromising with the government and in Google’s case it means omitting politically sensitive information.

Over the last couple of days I noticed that Google.com and gmail.com had some outages but that can be due to a number of reasons.

It could be intentional to drive people to the .cn version, it could be a hick-up in the firewall, it could be the pipes, it could even be China Telecom.

More interesting to read is that Brin mentioned “..virtually all the company’s customers in China use the non-censored service.”

Is that out of habit?
Is it because Google.com is the default search engine in the browser?
Is it because customers want to search for something “bad”?

Answers to these questions could be rather useful to help in deciding the ‘something different”.

But besides all this, the main questions is this. What happens if Google decides to pull out, cancel google.cn.

My guess is nothing will happen. Well nothing, it’s likely google.com will be less accessible or maybe blocked totally as the Government will feel frustrated by the fact that the Google guys don’t play along.

Chinese customers may not be happy, discuss it even but in the end they are used to sudden changes and will move their searches to baidu and yahoo or use proxies if they are internet savvy enough.

Not so long ago they changed their name to Guge to chinafy their operation here. I actually translated their introduction song and in my view it showed a lack of understanding as nobody was waiting for that. Why change the name of a brand that all internet users in China are familiar with?

Right now they are sending mixed signals, as noted by John, which shows that internally in Google the views are not yet on the same page.

It could be, but that’s my speculation, that part of the deal of chinafying Google.cn (Guge.cn) is that the Government has promised to leave Google.com alone. (Although that doesn’t imply one can find everything in Google.com as certain sensitive searches are blocked there anyway and freeze the page for some minutes)

For the moment, keeping both sites in place, sounds like the best way forward and one can only hope that the .com will stay accesible

I got a question John. I own multiple apparel stores. I have a great local brand name. Should I get a tagline? My brother suggests no, because our name is good enough. How important is a tagline? Google doesnt have one, Nike does. What should I do?

Surely, Brin, Page, Schmidt also were aware of the many “loopholes”.

It was an extremely difficult decision to wrestle with.