Google being blocked and redirected in China

We know China will block Internet sites whose politics they don’t like (it has happened to us) but now it seems they may be blocked for business reasons as well. Worse, it has been reported that they are redirecting traffic from some sites to those of competitors. Isn’t that stealing? From Business Week, “China’s Internet Censors Strike Again”:

Google has confirmed that the search giant’s Chinese service was out of business for parts of last Thursday and Friday. “We’ve had numerous reports that Google.cn and other search engines were inaccessible in China last week,” says John Pinette, Google’s Hong Kong-based spokesman, adding that “traffic was being redirected to other sites.”

Pinette wouldn’t comment on just where that Google traffic went. But it seems the site that ended up receiving the Google traffic was Baidu, the Chinese search engine that is tops in the market and over the years has been able to win fans among Chinese officialdom for being obedient in following censorship rules. Baidu already has a big lead over Google in the Chinese search market (more than half of Chinese searches take place on Baidu, versus about 25% for Google). It doesn’t help Google’s cause that the censors seem to be steering traffic Baidu’s way, too.