14 DAY TRIAL // The 'war' between China and Google seems to be escalating, even though China hasn't made too much of a deal out of Google's decision to close down its Chinese search engine and move it to Hong Kong. The page Google has set up to keep track of the availability of its services in mainland China is now reporting that its mobile services are being "Partially Blocked," the first change since the page went up a week ago.
The availability page is similar to the one Google offers for various services but it is dedicated to the China region and has only recently been launched. It lists Google's major services, Web Search, Images, YouTube, Sites, News, Ads, Docs, Gmail, Blogger, Picasa, Groups and finally Mobile. The Mobile category, which has now changed from Available to Partially Blocked, wasn't available when the page first launched. All the other services have maintained their respective statuses.
The status change means that the service is blocked in several parts of the country or that access is restricted broadly in some way. Google web searches on its Hong Kong site have been filtered almost since Google.cn started redirecting to Google.com.hk, just like any other foreign site. However, Google's doesn't rate this as being a block, so web search is being shown as available in China for the moment.
It's hard to say what the blocking means going further, but it doesn't bode well for Google in China. The mobile market in the country is even bigger than the desktop Internet one and it is growing at a huge rate. Chinese operators have already dropped search deals with Google which should significantly harm the company's market share on the mobile front. Google has about half the mobile search market, tied with Baidu, a much better standing than in regular search, where it only had a 25 percent market share.