China is wrapping Google in more red tape and the search engine company is struggling to move, as new report says the Chinese government has unleashed a new set of Internet regulations.
With its shakedown of Microsoft and its ongoing antitrust campaign that primarily targets foreigners, analysts both in and outside of the country have been expressing fears that China is slowly closing itself off from the rest of the world. A large part of that alleged isolationism would appear to be what many consider the crippling of foreign tech companies in favor of bolstering home-grown products.
Google is said to be the latest target in a long line of foreign tech companies that have had their core services squeezed by new regulations or new, aggressive interpretations of existing laws. Google is among those hardest hit by China's most recent tightening of Internet regulations, according to a report from Keith Bradsher and Paul Mozur of the New York Times.
"Chinese exporters have struggled to place Google ads that appeal to overseas buyers," stated the report. "Biotechnology researchers in Beijing had trouble recalibrating a costly microscope this summer because they could not locate the online instructions to do so. And international companies have had difficulty exchanging Gmail messages among far-flung offices and setting up meetings on applications like Google Calendar."
To show just how much Google's latest wounds are being felt by businesses, the report sources an anonymous chief information technology officer (CTO) at a firm in China.
"We were hooked on collaborative editing," stated the CTO. "You can edit a Word document or spreadsheet together and everything is kept in sync -- that way our management could track the status of the products we were working on."
The problems that were overlooked back when China's economy was even more bountiful are now hard to get past, according to Shaun Rein, managing director of the China Market Research Group. While homegrown tech companies such as Tencent and Xiaomi are continuing to expand their global reach, some of their foreign rivals have been rethinking their efforts in the country.
Last month, China kicked foreigners Symantec and Kasperky off its list of approved vendors for security software. The security firms that remained on the list were all Chinese companies. In the same month, Chinese officials indicated that China was in the process of releasing its own operating system to replace the banned Windows 8 in government buildings.
