Lawmakers call for Cisco, others to review China

Google incident prompts some in Congress to call for US high tech scrutiny of Chinese operations

CNN carried a Dow Jones story today on how some in Congress are calling for other US IT titans to follow Google's lead and review, even perhaps exit the Chinese market - the largest Internet market in terms of number of users. Google this week threatened to leave China in the wake of repeated hacks and attacks against its networks and systems in an apparent effort to access intellectual property.

A group of Republican congressional delegates called for Cisco, Microsoft, Yahoo and other high tech companies to review their operations in China in the wake of the Google incident and evaluate if their business and assets are at risk. Microsoft already said it had no plans to exit China, according to this report from colleague John Fontana.

Cisco declined to comment for the CNN/Dow Jones story but a spokesperson did e-mail a comment to Forbes:

"We are closely following recent industry discussions regarding censorship in China. But as Cisco is not a service or content provider and doesn't participate in the censorship of information by any government, we cannot comment regarding the specific cases of any of our industry peers."

Ironically, Cisco this week realigned operations in the Asia Pacific with an increasing focus on China. The company plans to spend billions there operationally.

HP bought 3Com to get deeper into the Chinese market. So the entanglements US high tech firms have there are broad and complex and deep.

As the Forbes post states:

China's burgeoning technology market, including much of the world's manufacturing and some ofthe largest and fastest growing collection of Web users in the world, may be too difficult to resist for technology companies trying to stay competitive. That means threats of losing intellectual property--a technology company's core asset--to highly trained cyberspies may be a cost of doing business in China.

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