在就中国用户电邮账户遭到黑客攻击发出警告10周之后，谷歌(Google)如其威胁的那样，在昨天终止了对其中国大陆的中文搜索引擎的审查。对google.cn的访问如今将会被转到其未经审查的香港站点。这是一个双输的局面。
如果该公司曾经期盼竞争对手响应自己的号召，那么它失败了。谷歌在1月份发布声明几小时后，微软(Microsoft)首席执行官史蒂夫•鲍尔默(Steve Ballmer)就将此事定性为“谷歌问题”；随后，商业伙伴很快便与其它公司达成交易。如果谷歌曾经打算掀起一场有关互联网自由的全球辩论，从而让中国难堪，那么它也失败了。中美关系的引爆点没有变化，仍是台湾、西藏以及贸易盈余。与此同时，其它地方发生的事件，如上月谷歌高管在米兰一家法庭被判侵犯隐私，使北京方面显得相当大度。
中国的开明人士会哀叹Google.cn的关闭。在今年全国人大年会的开幕会上，一名发言人显然是真心实意地将中国最大搜索引擎百度(Baidu)与冬奥会短道速滑金牌得主王�相提并论。王�能打破纪录是由于有强劲的对手在后面紧追不舍。不过，在中国大城市以外的网吧，谷歌中文网站的关闭不会引起多少人的注意。
对于过去两个月的争论，谷歌或许会试图以成功冠之，理由是其夸耀不已的原则得到了坚持。不过，该公司可能达成的妥协（退出搜索业务，但保留去年占集团销售额3%的其它业务），将使这种“坚持原则”的说法大打折扣。谷歌“在华业务的新方式”（new approach to China，即1月份声明的题目——译者注）由此将成为老方式的缩减版。与此同时，谷歌放弃的利润已经在百度、腾讯(Tencent)和其它竞争对手的股价中得以体现。而中国的防火长城似乎空前的可怕和难以逾越。
Lex专栏是由FT评论员联合撰写的短评，对全球经济与商业进行精辟分析
译者/和风
Ten weeks after raising the alarm over the hacking of Chinese users' e-mail accounts, Google yesterday ended censorship of its local Chinese search engine as threatened. Traffic will now be redirected to its uncensored Hong Kong arm. This is a lose-lose scenario.
If Google had hoped to rally rivals to its cause, it failed. Within hours of Google's January statement, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft characterised it as the “Google problem”; commercial partners were then quick to do deals with others. If Google was planning to embarrass China by whipping up a global debate on internet freedom, it failed. The big Sino-US flashpoints remain the same: Taiwan, Tibet and the trade surplus. Events elsewhere, meanwhile – such as the conviction last month of Google executives in a Milan court, for privacy violations – made Beijing seem lenient.
Enlightened souls in China should rue the closure of Google.cn. At the opening event of this year's National People's Congress, a spokesman made an apparently sincere analogy between Baidu, China's default search champion, and Wang Meng, the gold medal-winning speed skater, breaking records thanks to a vigorous rival breathing down her neck. Still, in internet cafés outside big cities, closure of Google's Chinese site would barely register.
Google may try to depict the last two months' wrangling as a success, on the grounds that its vaunted principles were upheld. Such a claim would be undermined, however, by the compromise it seems likely to strike: the search business goes, but the rest – 3 per cent of group sales last year – stays. Google's “new approach to China” would then be a stripped-down version of the old one. Meanwhile, the income it surrenders has been factored into the stock prices of Baidu, Tencent and the rest. And the Great Firewall of China seems more fearsome and impenetrable than ever.
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001031864
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