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On January 12, 2010, Google announced that it was "no longer willing to continue censoring" results on Google.cn, citing a breach of Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The company found that the hackers had breached two Gmail accounts but were only able to access 'from' and 'to' information and subject headers of emails in these accounts.[29] The company's investigation into the attack showed that at least 34 other companies had been similarly targeted. Among the companies that were attacked were Adobe Systems, Symantec, Yahoo, Northrop Grumman and Dow Chemical. Experts claim the aim of the attacks was to gain information on weapon systems, political dissidents, and valuable source code that powers software applications.[30] Additionally, dozens of Gmail accounts in China, Europe, and the United States had been regularly accessed by third parties, due to phishing or malware on the users' computers rather than a security breach at Google. Although Google did not explicitly accuse the Chinese government of the breach, it said it was no longer willing to censor results on google.cn, and that it will discuss over the next few weeks "the basis on which we could run an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China."[31][32] Google.cn transiently turned off its search result filtering. However, the filtering was later re-enabled without any acknowledgment or explanation; search queries in Chinese on the keywords Tiananmen or June 4, 1989 returned censored results with the standard censorship footnote.[33]

On January 13, 2010, the news agency AHN reported that the U.S. Congress plans to investigate Google's allegations that the Chinese government used the company's service to spy on human rights activists.[34] In a major speech by the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, analogies were drawn between the Berlin Wall and the free and unfree Internet.[35] Chinese articles came back saying that the U.S. uses the internet as a means to create worldwide hegemony based on western values. [36] The issue of Google's changed policy toward China has been cited as a potentially major development in world affairs, marking a split between authoritarian capitalism and the Western model of free capitalism and Internet access.[37]

The Chinese government has since made numerous standard and general statements on the matter, but has taken no real actions. It also criticized Google for failing to provide any evidence of its accusation.[38] Accusations were made by Baidu, a Chinese search engine with close ties to the government, that Google was pulling out for financial rather than humanitarian reasons. Baidu is the market leader in China with about 60% of the market share compared to Google's 31%, Yahoo placing third with less than 10%.[39] The state-run China Daily published a scathing op-ed on Google which criticized western leaders for politicizing the way in which China controls citizen's access to the Internet, saying "implementing monitoring according to a country's national context is what any government has to do," and that China's need to censor the internet is greater than that of developed countries, "The Chinese society has generally less information bearing capacity than developed countries such as the U.S. ..."[40]

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A friend of mine a few years ago was relying entirely on Google for its traffic and got almost entirely unreferenced and his pagerank to 0 in one day because they did not like what he was doing. He learnt the hard way to never build a business relying entirely on one partner and one platform.

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