Word: internetting
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Even before jan. 12, 2010, life was pretty good for Robin Li. The soft-spoken 41-year-old is the co-founder and chief executive of Baidu.com, the dominant search engine in China, the country with the most Internet users in the world. His stake in the company - started in 1999, five years after getting his M.S. from SUNY Buffalo in 1994 - is worth about $2.8 billion now. That makes him the seventh richest man in China, according to the annual rankings in Forbes magazine. Though he's been a computer geek since his undergraduate days at Peking University...
...then came Jan. 12, and for Li and Baidu, things went from the sublime to the ridiculous. That's the day Google drew its now famous line in the sand, saying it was no longer willing to censor its Internet searches in China - as the authoritarian government demands - given what it believes have been repeated attempts by Chinese authorities to hack its systems and steal dissidents' Gmail addresses. However noble Google's sentiment may be, in business terms it was "effectively a suicide note" when it came to the search business, as one rival Internet executive put it. "Google...
...company turned its first profit in 2004, and went public on the Nasdaq the following year, raising more than $100 million in the process. It was by far the most successful Internet IPO since the dotcom bubble burst in 2000. One of its earliest investors, in fact, was Google - before the company entered the China market in 2006. It paid $5 million for a 2.6% stake in Baidu in 2004. But Google sold its stake in Baidu for about $60 million two years later, and entered the search business in China on its own. It was game...
...Baidu got traction in its home market by focusing its search engine on China-centric information. "Initially, we were better [than Google] on stuff a Chinese Internet user would search for," says one insider. "They've since closed that gap somewhat, but that emphasis early helped us get and maintain our lead.'' Baidu has also introduced a question-and-answer service called "Baidu Knows," which is a hit. And the company just won a big legal battle when a popular music-download function it offers was cleared of copyright infringement by a Beijing court. The complaint had been brought against...
...drowning out all others. But Kennedy's world of stifled corporations and voiceless labor unions bears little resemblance to the one we live in. At the same time, Stevens' picture of corporate fat cats oppressing the little guy ignores the revolutions in campaign finance and communications wrought by the Internet. The Justices' hyperbole aside, chances are that the 2010 congressional midterm elections will be little changed: a blend of big-money manipulation and grass-roots passion, in which all the players share one common complaint--that the other guy has too much power...