Banning Google 15 years ago, what is China planning to do now?

Although it does not provide direct services in China, Google still has business operations in many areas, especially its association with mobile carriers and the Android operating system.

Google office in Beijing. Photo: Inc.

China’s response to the US tariffs on its goods includes an antitrust investigation into Google. However, the announcement by the State Administration for Market Regulation did not specify the suspicious activities of the Internet company or the scope of the surveillance. This is all the more surprising since Google’s search engine and all its services have long been unavailable in China.

However, the company still has many advertising, cloud computing, hardware manufacturing, and application development activities associated with the billion-people country.

Google's operations in China

Google launched its search engine for the billion-people market in 2006, under the .cn domain name. By 2009, the service passed censorship, entered the mainland market and rose to become one of the most used websites. But by 2010, all Google services had to be shut down when they did not comply with the authorities' request to filter results. Since then, the Google website and all of the company's services have been unavailable in China.

Without any notable activities, Google still maintains offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. According to CNBC , the US company's business activities in this market include advertising, cloud computing, hardware manufacturing, application development, AI research... Google's goal is to provide infrastructure for domestic companies when expanding internationally.

The search engine stopped operating in China in 2010, but the company did not leave. Photo: Fortune.

For example, it sells keyword ads on search engines and YouTube to Chinese companies in markets it wants to dominate. Google also provides cloud services to many unicorns such as TikTok, NetEase, Shein operating in Southeast Asia and other regions.

In AI, the internet giant established an artificial intelligence research center in Beijing in 2017, focusing oneducation and natural language understanding. Open source projects like TensorFlow and Kubernetes have a big influence on the Chinese developer community. They also hold their own I/O event every year for programmers in the country of a billion people.

The Play Store is not available in China. However, Google still cooperates to bring domestic apps to the world. Chinese phones sold in the country use their own user interfaces but are still built on the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) kernel, led by Google.

In 2023, Alphabet reported 17% of its revenue coming from the Asia- Pacific region. But the contribution of the billion-people market was not disclosed.

What is China investigating?

According to the Financial Times , the source said that the investigation by the authorities is aimed at the Android operating system. The issue mentioned is the monopoly that is damaging Chinese mobile manufacturers, such as Xiaomi, Oppo, which are using this platform.

The source also revealed that China had been investigating Google since 2019, around the same time Huawei was banned. But it was then shelved until December 2024, when Mr. Trump is about to take office. The Financial Times said that authorities had searched Google's office in Beijing since early January and requested relevant information.

Three American companies are in the sights of Chinese authorities. Photo: FT.

Liu Xu, a researcher at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at Tsinghua University in China, said the investigation was aimed at US companies as part of retaliation against the Trump administration's tariffs on Chinese goods. In addition to Google, Nvidia and Intel are also being targeted by the Chinese government.

Meanwhile, according to Gong Jiong of the China University of Business and Foreign Trade, Chinese mobile companies have long been unhappy with Google’s market manipulation of Android. Currently, except for Apple and Huawei, all other companies have to pay to use this operating system on smartphones sold internationally.

In recent years, Google has faced repeated allegations of antitrust violations. Many lawsuits have taken place in the EU, South Korea, Russia, India, and Turkey. In August 2024, a US federal judge ruled that Google had illegally monopolized the search market. The US Justice Department is considering a proposal to split the company's business, including divesting the company of its Android operating system and Chrome browser.