It isn’t a big secret that China wants the internet to work their way. So when the biggest search engine in China, Baidu, got hammered by a hacker, all of a sudden they were outraged and wanted to play hardball. Baidu is to China what Google is to the rest of us. The tension between China and Google is pretty intense already in that China wants to censor Google and Google isn’t that interested in being pushed around. Now as China gets a taste of what it is like to operate a global search engine, they may be learning that they can’t tame the internet as easily as they would like.

Baidu came up against some serious hackers who took down the web site recently. The hackers went under the name of the Iranian Cyber Army. These hackers are very good at their jobs because not long ago, hackers going by that name took down Twitter. Now, the Iranian Cyber Army may be no more than five teenagers in a basement in New Jersey. Whoever they are, they are darn good at what they do.

Just like China feels they should have special rules about Google, their outrage at seeing Baidu taken down by hackers was aimed at the domain service. Instead of just beefing up their own security, Baiku filed suit against the domain registar in a New York court. Their reasons for the lawsuit are listed as gross negligence by the company, Register.com. The lawsuit doesn’t come right out with the facts that Baidu was hacked. Instead, they just claimed a service outage. At the moment, Register.com has not commented on the lawsuit.

It will be interesting to see how this approach to getting hammered by a hacker works out for the Chinese. It is the job of domain services like Register.com to provide routing and internet service so that when a user types in a URL, there are sent to that web page.

But hackers took over that routing from Baidu and the Chinese are now enraged that such a thing could happen. It will be interesting if the Chinese can sue someone just because hackers did to them what they did to Twitter. Even if the lawsuit goes nowhere, the Chinese will not confess that they were attacked by hackers, especially if it turns out it is a bunch of teenagers in a basement in New Jersey.