14 DAY TRIAL // Google made waves and headlines when it announced in January that it would stop censoring search results in China even if it meant leaving the country altogether. Since then, though, there has been little information coming from either Google or Chinese officials and some have begun to wonder if the search giant isn't starting to back down on its initial hard stance. At the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, Google CEO Eric Schmidt assured everyone that the plan to drop censorship was on track and that the company's ongoing negotiations with Chinese representatives would reach a conclusion "soon," though he wouldn't elaborate further on that.
"We are in active negotiations with the Chinese government," Eric Schmidt told reporters at a media summit, according to the WSJ. He wouldn't comment on the status of negotiations, which is to be expected. He did, however, say that there would be news to share soon. "I'm going to use the word 'soon', which I will not define otherwise," he said. "There is no specific timetable. Something will happen soon."
The vagueness of the implied timeline, which Schmidt himself underlined, means that any news on the negotiations might just as well be coming in a week or a month. Even so, the fact that he said anything at all is an indication that an end to the negotiations is in sight.
An all-out sophisticated attack on the Google infrastructure, along with other 20 or so large US companies, apparently originating from China and possibly linked to the local government, was the tipping point, which made Google reconsider its stance in the country. The company said it was no longer willing to censor results on Google.cn in order to comply with local laws.
However, Google has stated that it doesn't want to leave the country altogether in the very likely event that it can't operate Google.cn any longer. Google has over 1,000 employees in the country and several other ventures except search. The two sides have been in negotiations for the better part of the past two months now. [via WSJ, Reuters]