Personal payments to and from India and transfers to local banks in India have been suspended while we work with our business partners and other stakeholders to address questions they have about the service

PayPal executives have been unavailable for comment on specific reasons why the service was discontinued. There is speculation that this may have something to do with new Indian government rules aimed at preventing money laundering. Last November, the Indian government introduced rules requiring financial institutions and other intermediaries to verify the identity of clients carrying out international money transfers.

Paypal has not just been blocking all their money transfer but has also not letting the Indian account holders withdraw money they already have in their accounts. For the past week, merchants have been unable to withdraw funds in Rupees to local Indian banks. shocking many Indians who have relyed on the service. The blocking started on January 28th and Paypal will only say that it is working to resolve the current situations in “the shortest span of time.”

The numbers announced last week by Woodside wine research firm Gomberg, Fredrikson &amp Associates analyst Jon Fredrikson at the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento. “As we basically had a financial heart attack, people just reined in their spending and were very cautious,” Fredrikson said. “They moved dramatically down to lower price points, below $5 and $7. Small wineries in the North Coast that sell bottles from $25 to $100 were basically shut out. Inventories backed up, and that just made it an ugly year.”

The biggest drop in wine sales is for bottles that retail for more than $20. Sales were off between 20 and 30 percent in 2009, Steve Rannekleiv, an analyst for Rabobank told the Chronicle.  During the same time, sales for wines that cost less than $6 a bottle rose 5 percent.

As consumers have tightened their purse strings, bulk wine imports from countries with lower production and land costs have climbed. Between 2007 and 2009, imports more than doubled to 13 million cases to capture 32 percent of the U.S. market. “Argentina is the sleeping giant,” Rannekleiv said. Argentina has 510,000 acres planted in grapes, compared with 480,000 in California, which produces 90 percent of the wine made in the United States.

The company, a subsidiary of Japan’s Sony Corp. also cut back last March, when it laid off nearly 250 people and eliminated nearly 100 open positions. Company staff was informed of the latest cuts in a memo Monday and through videos by the studio co-chairs on an employee Web site. “Our industry is affected by two things: It’s affected by the economy, of course, and it’s affected by technology,” co-chair Amy Pascal says in the video. “Over the last two years, it’s changed people’s DVD buying habits, which has had a huge effect on our company and the industry at large.”

The home video market has been declining as people have not been buying videos as often, and instead turn to rentals, which are far less profitable for the industry.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on the board of Apple for three years and at one time it was said that they had a pact not to poach each other’s employees. They were always thought to be united in fighting a bigger enemy – Microsoft.

In 2007, however, Google released Android, a mobile phone operating system; while the iPhone runs on a propitiatory operating system developed by Apple. At first, this was was seen as primarily an attack on Microsoft and its Windows OS. Still, the handwriting was on the wall, and Schmidt resigned from the board of Apple a month later.

Then, in the July 2009 Google announced the Google’s Chrome OS, a web-based operating system meant for netbooks, and has more recently even announced its own “app store” that would directly compete with the Apple app store. With the launch last week of the iPad – essentially a high end netbook – it seems Apple now considers the Chrome OS a direct threat.

Now it has really come to a head. Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs reportedly verbally attacked Google Inc. at an employee meeting after rolling out the new iPad tablet computer last week. Wired reported that Google’s entry into the phone business with its Nexus One drew the ire of Apple CEO. They quoted attendees of the meeting in which Jobs reportedly let loose a tirade where he called Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto “bullshit” “We did not enter the search business, they entered the phone business,” it reported Jobs told his employees. “Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.”

It seems incredibly strange that the Chinese government should be able to pull one of our most successful products just because it is successful, without any repercussions at all from our government.  Should the U.S. now stop the sale of some manufactured goods from China, as soon as they become successful?

As reported in the New York Times, a spokesman for Alibaba, said executives at the company were “angry” because Yahoo appeared to follow Google in suggesting the Chinese government was behind the cyberattacks.  They issued a statement saying that Yahoo was “reckless” in supporting Google because they believed there was a lack of evidence that the attacks were supported by the Chinese government. 

Yahoo is one of the companies that was targeted in the attacks but the company declined to confirm that it was a victim. “The people with knowledge of the situation said that Google contacted Yahoo about the attacks before it publicized them. Google executives were dismayed that other companies were unwilling to publicly acknowledge the attacks, and they were particularly frustrated by Yahoo’s silence” the Times reported. 

Yahoo paid Alibaba $1 billion in 2005 and gave Alibaba control of Yahoo China in exchange for a 40 percent stake in the Chinese company. Yahoo’s investment in Alibaba has paid off in a big way for that company. Alibaba.com, a unit of Alibaba, went public in 2007 with a huge stock offering in Hong Kong and is now valued at $12.5 billion.  Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba is a celebrity in China because of his success in forcing California’s Ebay to leave the Chinese market, and for taking over Yahoo’s China operations, as part of their billion dollar investment in his company. 

This was a huge amount of capital from a California company that was used to make Alibaba fantastically successful. Now that company is turning on very the people who helped it become what it is.  Is this a simple case of “sucking up” to the Chinese authorities?  Jack Ma is said to be famous for that, and some people even believe he is now milking the resources out of Yahoo so it eventually fails in that country. 

In any event, a consensus seems to be forming that this is a free trade issue.  If the Chinese government blocks Google or other American Internet firms – or forces them to leave that country, the the American Goverment should take the same action with Chinese Internet firms – and it seems like a good place to start would be Alibaba.

“Any decision made by Google will not affect Sino-U.S. trade and economic relations, as the two sides have many ways to communicate and negotiate with each other,” Chinese government spokesman Yao Jian told a news briefing in Beijing.

Well of course the two sides have many ways to communicate with each other – that is not the point. If one party to a trade agreement censors and blocks the content of the other party, then of course it should it should be a trade issue.  In the tit for tat world of diplomacy, if they block the content from one of our companies, then shouldn’t we block one of theirs?

California buys a huge amount of Chinese imports, but they don’t by nearly as many of our exports. One of our strongest industries in the movie industry – but only 20 foreign films are even allowed to be shown in that country each year. The rest of the movies we produce here are simply pirated (i.e. stolen) there, Can you imagine if we said to China, “we will only allow the products from 20 of your manufacturers in our country each year”. Now they are blocking, and possibly even attacking, one of California’s other great industries – Internet services.

It is not at all disrespectful to China to expect our government to respond to blocking and censorship with reciprocal actions that affect Chinese companies. That is how a mature trade relationship works. Mr. Yao Jian has it wrong. This is exactly the kind of thing that should affect trade and economic relations – this is a trade issue.

UPDATE: Evidence that the Obama Administration may be looking at these blocking and censorship issues from a more sensible “fair trade” perspective, might be found in a speech Secretary of State Clinton plans to give on the issue on Thursday. From a column by Andrew Ross in today’s San Francisco Chronicle:

“The Internet is integral to the international trading system,” said Ed Black, CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, who is scheduled to meet with Clinton on the matter this week. “China cannot limit the free flow of information and still comply with its international trade obligations.” “You can’t lecture the Chinese on human rights,” said another industry executive. “You won’t get anywhere with that. So, it’s best to treat it as a trade issue.”

Should the administration go that route, it will enlarge the can of U.S.-China worms already growing around the latter’s increasingly protectionist economic policies. “Greater control of the Internet is part of a wholesale tightening up of the Chinese economy,” said an executive with a high-tech trade organization that is also due to meet with Clinton. “It’s about protecting domestic industries and pushing indigenous innovation. But they’re doing it in blatantly discriminatory, brazenly unfair ways.”

“We condemn any attempts to infiltrate company networks to obtain user information.  We stand aligned with Google that these kinds of attacks are deeply disturbing and strongly believe that the violation of user privacy is something that we as Internet pioneers must all oppose.”

The issue is sensitive for Yahoo because they provided information from their servers to the Chinese government that resulted in long prison terms for two Chinese journalists.  Yahoo is much more entrenched in China however.  They sold their Internet operations to Alibaba – a Chinese trade portal operator, but retained a 39 percent stake in that company.  According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Yahoo spokeswoman Nina Blackwell declined on  to say whether its solidarity with Google would cause the company to sell its Alibaba holdings.