"Google announced Monday it has stopped censoring its Chinese-language search engine Google.cn and was redirecting mainland Chinese users to an uncensored site in Hong Kong. Google's move, which risks angering the Chinese authorities, came a little more than two months after the Internet giant said it had been the victim of cyberattacks originating from China.
The Mountain View, California-based Google said it would no longer censor search results in China but intends to continue research and development work there and maintain a sales presence. "Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard," Google chief legal officer David Drummond said in a blog post at googleblog.blogspot.com.
Drummond expressed hope the Chinese authorities would not seek to block access to Google services, which also include popular video site YouTube. "We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services," he said.
"In terms of Google's wider business operations, we intend to continue R&D work in China and also to maintain a sales presence there," Drummond said. "The size of the sales team will obviously be partially dependent on the ability of mainland Chinese users to access Google.com.hk."
China has denied involvement in the December cyber attacks which Google said targeted more than 20 other companies and included attempts to access the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world. Drummond said China made it clear during negotiations that Google would not be allowed to offer an uncensored search engine...
Drummond stressed that "all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them."Google launched its Chinese-language search engine in January 2006 after agreeing to censor websites for content banned under Chinese law."
http://www.bangkokpost.com/breakingnews/17...g-condemns-move
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Google stops censoring its website in China
Started by Gene, Mar 23 2010 09:55 AM
1 reply to this topic
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Posted 24 March 2010 - 09:25 AM
I certainly don't know much about the economics of Google's situation in China, but I think the idea of Google's going into China in the first place by allowing the government to censor its content was terrible. I'm glad to see that Google has obviously had second thoughts and decided that it would rather not do business in China than cooperate with a totalitarian regime to filter the internet.
