Google's threat to pull out of China over censorship is a rare display of defiance in a system where foreign companies have long accepted intrusive controls to gain access to a huge and growing market.
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But despite risking damage to their reputations by cooperating with the government, they have struggled to make headway against intense competition from Chinese rivals. Yahoo, eBay Inc. and others have given up and turned over control of their China operations to local partners. Google is the last global Internet company to manage its own China arm.

Google trails local competitor Baidu Inc. but has gained market share at the expense of smaller competitors. Google had 31.8 percent of search revenues in 2009, versus 60.9 percent for Baidu, according to Analysys
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Google said Tuesday it would stop censoring search results on Google.cn. That would allow users to find politically sensitive photos and Web sites abroad, though downloading them might still be barred by government filters. It also said it had discovered that computer hackers had tricked human-rights activists into exposing their e-mail accounts to outsiders.

Tags: China, Google, intrusive controls, censorship, human-rights activists,

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