SEVERAL INTERNET disruptions in Asia this week portend what could be a long standoff between China and foreign web search companies.

On Tuesday, hackers hit Vietnamese-speaking computer users in an attempt to stop criticism of a controversial Chinese-backed mining project in Vietnam, according to Google. Foreign journalists covering China and Taiwan reported that their Yahoo e-mail accounts were recently hacked.

The episodes came amid growing anxiety over the Chinese government’s response to Google’s decision to shut down its search engine there and reroute traffic to an uncensored site based in Hong Kong.

On Monday, Google said it appeared that China had temporarily blocked mainland users from accessing its Hong Kong site.

The Chinese government has not confirmed the reports and Google says it is unclear where the malware attack on Vietnamese computer users originated. Analysts however say the incidents indicate that Beijing is unmoved by international criticism of its censorship practices and may continue to interfere with web traffic.

“What we’re doing is running our business,” said a source at Google who spoke on the condition of anonymity, “but we hope we don’t die a death of a thousand cuts and understand that this happens.”

Some experts say Google had to take a stand against China because of a growing movement among other nations, including Australia, to pass laws that would censor some online content, including pornography.

Iran blocks Facebook and Google and Turkey suspended access to YouTube in 2007 because of videos that presented its national founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, unfavourably.

However Google faces a balancing act in resisting China’s censorship policies, as important US trade partners such as South Korea and Italy also have imposed controls over web access.

“It’s a business decision in that it is easier to run a business with a single framework,” said Clay Shirky, a new media professor at New York University, “but if a government succeeds in introducing controls over the internet, Google stops being a single supranational business and turns into 193 national businesses – and it’s not fun running 193 businesses.”

Google’s move has cooled some of its relationships with partners in China, but it would not be significantly hurt by the loss of business there, said Clayton Moran, a stock analyst at the Benchmark Co.

He said Google’s online advertising business in China represented about only 1 per cent of its total revenue.

“But what is potentially lost is future growth,” Moran said. China “is the largest internet market by users today” and it was immature from a monetisation standpoint, he added. – (Washington Post)