I'm Paul Biggar, one of the founders.

There's a lot of speculation and reading between the lines going on here. There is really no information to go off, and jumping to conclusions based on that email is a little unfair. (By contrast, the journalists to whom that email was addressed had tons of context.)

I'm in the middle of writing a "what went wrong" piece, which I'll link to here, but I'll ask you guys to hold off judgement until then.

Many friends of mine have asked for my opinions on this. Figured now will be a good time to vent it out. About myself: http://alexdong.com/. I grow up in China, right now staying in Shanghai, waiting for my australia immigration visa. I have to say that I feel really sad and powerless about this whole event. I think China is gradually cutting itself from outside, like what we've done in 1600.

Instead of writing a long post explaining what I'm having in mind, I found it might be a good idea just to explain why most of the posts so far are unfortunately quite wrong.

> @falsestprophet: The question of who rules China is pretty interesting. It turns out that the whole operation is run by a group of 9 scientists and engineers.

It's easy to think of China as a multi-core Hilter country but it's not. It's true that the 9-people Politburo has the power to set the rules but they're only the top of the iceberg. There are HUGE amount of low level officials, about 5% - 15% population, that actually rule the country using more morale codes rather than laws. Legal process has long been considered scraped. The last Politburo, with Jiang ZeMin as the president, has actually tried really hard to open up China and setup direct dialogue. But the current one has been cracking down on transparent governing since 2002. The next 'election' will be on 2012, we'll see how that goes. I'm not holding any high expectation here since 1) majority of Chinese population actually agrees with censorship. 2) China has a long history of Xenocide. The boxer rebellion in 1900 was pretty bad and the current communist party is actually silently encouraging that type of nationalism emotions.

> @varjag: Google obeying their directive, if only formally, is a face-saving act for CPC. The redirect from the landing page can easily be censored, Google can have their Internet license, and the Party can pretend to domestic public that they have won. Everyone is happy.

I might be wrong but I don't believe Google will ever get their ICP license issued. I'm not going to argue about this but let's assume that's what happen at end of June, here are the implications I think are highly possible: * http://google.cn/ and http://g.cn/ will be dead in the dust. * Chinese will still be able to use http://google.com/ * We'll see lots of `Connection Reset` error whenever the page contains 'sensitive' contents. * I doubt the chinese version of Google will be still accessible. For people like me, we'll continue to use our `ssh -C -2 -D` channel or VPN to visit whatever websites we'd like to use. For most Chinese people, they won't care.

> @jackowayed: How does that affect the Hacker-News-reading types who would want to hack together a website and start making money from it? How difficult/expensive/slow is it to get an ICP?

I used to run China's largest photo blogging site so I have some out-of-date data to share here. There are actually two kinds of ICP licenses, one is for sites with user generated content and the other without. It takes us 4500 RMB and 3 months to get a license. We have to explicitly write down the IP addresses and the hosting companies. Yes, shared hosting is a risk business since your 'neighbor' might cause the physical machine be unplugged from the internet, which I have witnessed with my own eyes once. Any further censorship requests will go through the hosting companies instead of directly from the government. For a million page view site, we'll usually get 1-3 phone requests per week to take down contents. What? Did we actually take down as requested? Of course I did! There was an accident that the whole data center was "unplugged" because of some VIP customer was a bit late.

> @garply: I think much of the damage from Google pulling out has already been done - I know people who've switched back to Baidu because they find little things about Google HK frustrating (for example, Google.cn used to mimic Baidu in that you didn't need to control click to open a search result in a new tab - that was the default - Google HK behaves like Google US does).

Ok, I have to say that Google's operation in China was a failure even without the censorship. They tried to copy the market leader by adding music search, discussion forums. Can you imagine Google has a direct link to a forum on their webpage here in China? Google used to be considered, 3-5 years ago, a more accurate search engine with higher quality users. But several mis-calculations on strategies essentially dig deep holes on the ship.

> @jrockway: Seems like they just want something to say to their investors when they have to leave China. If the government fucks them over, it's not Google's fault. If Google just leaves, then their shareholders might be upset.

I think western world is under-estimating the hoops they'll have to jump through in China. Everyone thinks you have to have a presence in China because the market is HUGE. But soon or later, they'll find either they lose control over local sales or have to retreat to focus only on a few major cities. With the changes in last 5 years, it's not only western international companies that have suffered from this, but also many non-state-owned local companies. At the beginning of 2010, state owned capitals have rushed into two industries: coal mining and real estate, and ebb non-state ones out of the game. The shareholders should thank google for pulling out since I don't think the ROI is strong enough to keep Google in China.

> @greenlblue: Don't native corporations in China have an interest in keeping Google out? I suspect their license will not be renewed.

Mind you that the largest search engine Baidu.com is not a Chinese company at all. But they managed to 'brand' themselves as a "national brand" and gain supports from governments.

Alex

I quit StackOverFlow once they devalued asking questions. No one on the site seemed to understand that incentivizing people to ask great questions was the most important thing. The site could have been a great starting point for learning esoteric topics like Haskell, Scheme, Lisp, Grails, Scala, Lift, Go, Emacs Lisp, etc.

Basically, in general, you need one good question with 2 or 3 good answers [yes, some types are better with 100 answers].

"How do I reverse a string in Java?" "How do I reverse a string in Haskell?" "How do I ... in Haskell?"

The questions could have been linked to build a Rosetta Stone, as well as a complete beginner's guide to topic X. Actually, it could have been a guide from beginner to guru.