The proposed withdrawal of Google from China has gotten a lot of coverage lately. The issue indicates an extreme example of government involvement in ICT. Here are some ‘between the headlines’ insights from a standards perspective:

1) When governments favour one or the other standard/company, as they did for Baidu in this case, the results are never good. We need competition and market forces to drive innovation. The current state of play in China is: we have no competition in the search engine market and hence potentially little incentive to innovate (even at 33 %, Google’s market share was substantial). The customers are the real losers.

2) International factors are more complex. To its credit, Baidu claims that it had a greater understanding of the local market. Also, China is not the only market where Google has a low market share. That distinction goes to the Korean market with Naver which has a market share of over 70 %, compared to 2 % of Google – which demonstrates that there may be some merit in the complexity of local/non English claim which Baidu makes

3) Search engine technologies are mostly proprietary. No one talks of ‘open standards’ for search engines. The only known instance of an open algorithm search engine Wikia search which called itself ‘a free and open-source Web search engine operated by ‘for-profit’ company’ died a lonely death with 0.000079 % market share.

4) Finally, as we know from the Telecoms industry, China has tried to influence standards in the Telecoms domain roaming by promoting TD-SCDMA instead of the more widely used W-CDMA standard. This leads to practical difficulties – for example for roaming customers.

To conclude, China – Google offers an extreme example of Government involvements in ICT roadmap but the same happens to a lesser degree globally. Ultimately, that cannot benefit the customers.