Google accused China of highly sophisticated espionage

Google versus China – one giant corporation and one giant economy are slamming each other. Google has accused China of highly sophisticated espionage: sneaking into the networks of American companies from Adobe to Dow Chemical via flaws in e-mail attachments in Google accounts. China has chided Google for that proverbial mountain in a molehill.

It is not a question of who blinks first but who loses most. At the highest level, old strifes – like human rights abuse and intellectual property theft – in national relations will boil over again.

Commercially, if Google exits China, it will shed US$300 million in revenue, though that is a tiny part of its US$22 billion in global sales. Chinese companies, which are increasingly putting their business on the cloud or Internet, will also suffer.

But mostly, it will be the wealth of information that the ordinary user access that will be lost.

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