Google to potentially pull out of China

In case you haven't read yet, apparently Google had some Gmail accounts hacked into (or at least it was attempted) of Chinese human rights activists. As a result, Google may stop filtering their searches for Chinese citizens.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

So a few questions:

What is the potential profit loss for Google in this scenario?

Should they have filtered the internet for China originally?

What kind of company steps into their void (American, Chinese, another country; established, new, something in between)?

How does this affect Chinese citizens in the short and long run?

Internet Class Divisions

Kind of funny, but kind of not…an interesting question is broached here. Are there class division emerging online? Read about this microcosm and lets discuss whether it is translatable to the entire internet and is this unpreventable.

http://www.alternet.org/media/142356/facebook_and_myspace_users_are_clearly_divided_along_class_lines/?page=1

“For decades, we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with "access" and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the "digital divide."
Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions. This is most salient in the States, which is intentionally the focus of my talk here today.”