That's the argument made in this TechCrunch post. Google was never going to take substantial market share from local search engine Baidu, the piece argues, so this scorched earth move was just a way to buy Google some good publicity before its inevitable retreat from China. Reinforcing that argument, the WSJ reports that the share of Google's overall revenue coming from China is 'relatively small', which means the price to Google for burning its bridges with Beijing is also low.
If this logic gains some traction in coming days, it could dilute the damage to China that I referred to in my initial post. But The Australian's China correspondent, Michael Sainsbury, clearly believes this is very bad for Beijing:
The unprecedented threat by the world biggest internet company casts China’s notorious disregard for intellectual property in an entirely new light and potentially raises a major obstacle for the country’s push for wider acceptance in the global community.
Photo by Flickr user pamhule, used under a Creative Commons license.
