A Chinese flag flutters beside Google's headquarters in Beijing on Thursday, Jan. 14, 2010. (AP)

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Google is huge. China is huge. And now they’re nose-to-nose in a very public standoff.

Google says China has hacked into its systems and the accounts of human-rights activists, and it’s not going to take it anymore. It’s going to stop censoring its search results for China, it says, and maybe pull out of the country.

China says its Internet is open — and that in any case Google, and anybody else who wants to do business in China, have to follow Chinese law.

It’s a business standoff. A standoff over principle. A standoff of giants.

This hour, On Point: Google versus China.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic. He was based in China from 2006 to 2009. His writings from China are collected in the book “Postcards from Tomorrow Square.”

Kara Swisher, technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal and co-executive editor of All Things Digital, a website owned by Dow Jones covering technology, the Internet and media.

David Barboza, correspondent for The New York Times.  He’s been based in Shanghai since November 2004. He writes about business and culture in China.

Yong Xue, professor of Asian History at Suffolk University.  He maintains a blog in China that has received over 22 million hits, and his columns appear in the Shanghai Morning Post (Xinwen Chen Bao) and China Newsweek (Zhongguo Xinwen Zhoukan).

A jet fly-by kicks off the aerial festivities celebrating the launch of the new T-Mobile myTouch 3G phone with Google's Android operating system, in San Francisco on Wednesday, August 5, 2009. (AP)

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“Cloud computing” sounds exotic, but it’s becoming absolutely commonplace.

All kinds of computer activity that used to happen in your home or office, on your PC’s local software, is instead happening online. On the Web. In the “cloud.”

Your digital address book is probably there. Your calendar. Your digital photos. And soon, much more — maybe all — of the computing you do will happen far from your desktop. On Internet server farms. In the cloud.

Google and Microsoft are battling there. And a lot more than money may be at stake.

This hour, On Point: Cloud computing and you.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Cambridge, Mass., is Jonathan Zittrain, professor at Harvard Law School, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and author of “The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It.” In a recent op-ed piece for The New York Times, titled “Lost in the Cloud,” he argued that cloud computing “comes with real dangers.”

And joining us from San Francisco is Kara Swisher, technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal and co-executive editor of All Things Digital, a website owned by Dow Jones covering technology, the Internet and media.

More:

In a guest post on the On Point blog, Jonathan Zittrain explains why he’s still worried — despite Kara Swisher’s and others’ “utterly reasonable optimism.”

First there was Microsoft, and a colossus made from software for the personal computer. Then those PCs got tied together on the web, and there was Yahoo, a giant hub for e-mail and chat rooms and all the web brought.

Then there was Google, the uber search engine and high-minded master of the Internet universe, with a mountain of web advertising and a vision of Microsoft going the way of the Model T.

Now it’s war. Microsoft is trying to gobble up Yahoo for $44 billion dollars and take on Google.

This hour, On Point: search engine wars, and the battle over the digital future.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Kevin Delaney, reporter for The Wall Street Journal, covers Silicon Valley and the technology sector.

Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, is author of “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google.”

Dylan Tweney, senior editor at Wired and Wired.com.

For months, cellphone aficionados — that is, a whole lot of this country — have waited for news of the “Google phone”: the “G-phone.” When it came, what Google rolled out was not, in fact, a gadget at all.

It was a vision of cellphones as the new PC; of the web rich and deep and always present in everyone’s hand; of freestyle armies of creative geeks firing up a new cellphone software platform called “Android.”

Your next phone may be free, with Google ads and the whole world in your hand.

This hour, On Point: Google, on the loose — and talk of revolution on your cellphone.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Kevin Delaney, reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He covers Google for the newspaper.

Rob Pegoraro, Consumer Technology Columnist for the Washington Post.

R. Ravi, associate dean of Intellectual Strategy at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business and professor of computer science.