There are allegations that the Chinese government has hijacked the major US search engines and redirected their Chinese search traffic to Baidu. AFP:

US Internet search engines in China were being hijacked and directed to Chinese-owned Baidu, analysts said Wednesday, speculating that this may be retaliation for the White House award to exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama. Analysts at Search Engine Roundtable, a website focusing on Internet search, said Chinese users trying to search on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft websites were being directed to the Chinese search engine.

“It seems like China is fed up with the US, so as a way to fight back, they redirected virtually all search traffic from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to Baidu, the Chinese based search engine,” the analysts wrote.

The authors said it was not clear exactly how or why the searches were being redirected, but China is known for tightly controlling the Internet and using a variety of filters to screen out search results for issues relating to dissidents or the Tibetan spiritual leader. On Wednesday, US President George W. Bush called for an end to “religious repression” in China as he defiantly became the first US leader to appear in public with the Dalai Lama.

As has been noted, Baidu, a Chinese company, is listed on NASDAQ. Search engines get much of their revenue from their traffic, because internet advertising revenues are related to page views, click-throughs, or other such metrics. Question: if China has been redirecting traffic from these other US public companies to the US public company Baidu for the economic benefit to China or otherwise, is it guilty of stock manipulation? Should the SEC be investigating China?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 3:40 pm and is filed under China, Law, New Media, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.