Google’s battle with the Chinese government has been brewing for some time now but it appears as if it’s finally come to a head.
Since they first came onto the scene in China, Google’s position in the communist country has been tenuous at best. For a company who’s mantra has been “do no evil,” censoring search results in order to hide and cover up dissension within the country seems to be pretty, well, against code. If you aren’t aware, China’s Internet policy is among the most strict in the world. The government actively filters out content which it doesn’t want its citizens to see online. That includes dissenting comments, protest movements, blogs, and, as far as I know, anything that’s overly critical of the Chinese government. (I’m probably blocked now, too!)
Even worse, Google has recently uncovered an enormous string of hacking attempts and successes on a number of its services—namely, Gmail—which it traced back to the Chinese government. According to Google, it was the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists which were the target and these accounts, it says, were routinely accessed by government officials in a kind of cyber-espionage.
Up until now though, Google has been pretty complicit. There have been ups and downs between China and Google and much, much, global criticism leveled against the search engine giant, but for the most part Google has gone along with the government’s Internet policies. The government hacking was the crack that broke the dam though, and today came the flood.
Beginning this afternoon, all traffic to the China search engine page, says Google, is now being redirected to their unfiltered servers in Hong Kong. Here’s a snippet of the press release,
Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from [Hong Kong] is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced—it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China.
What’s more, Google has set up this page to monitor exactly what the Chinese government is blocking access to. That means if China decides to block Google’s new unfiltered searches, the world will find out.
It seems like Google is finally taking serious steps towards a sensible Internet policy in China.
Whoohoo!