http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Google_..._03222010.html"Earlier today we stopped censoring our search services -- Google Search, Google News, and Google Images -- on Google.cn," Google chief legal officer David Drummond said in a blog post.
"Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong," he said.
I'm surprised nobody brought this latest turn of events yet.
My favorite part is how they redirect searches to Hong Kong -- hey, look at that! Your countrymen in Hong Kong don't have their searches censored...
Surprisingly, China apparently doesn't have a coordinated response ready. I'd totally expected them to crack down immediately, but so far there's apparently only been a piecemeal and partial response.
[Edit] Oh, and a couple more links:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03..._to_hong_kong/
http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en
As of right now (3/22 ~8:30pm PST) Web, Images, New, Ads, and Gmail are clear. Docs, Picasa, and Groups are "partially blocked".
Last edited by Jasper Phillips; 03-22-2010 at 08:38 PM.
I wonder if China truly cares. Baidu is doing much better for them in terms of market share and they've already shut out facebook for a long time without major repurcussions. China is happy as long as they are making money and can control what's on the internet. Google getting out of China is more harmful to their "internet world dominance" than it is to China.
I think they care. Otherwise they wouldn't put so much effort into censorship.
Sorry, I meant care about Google leaving. Obviously, they care about censorship. I suspect they'll just start censoring the HK servers, but I confess to not knowing exactly how that works.Originally Posted by Jasper
I'd have expected them to not care about Google leaving either, but their hesitancy in responding makes me wonder whether they do actually care -- they certainly have the capability and technical competency to have had an immediate shutdown ready.
I'm not quite sure what would make them care though.... Maybe they feel their grip on power isn't so tight after all, and that they need to tread carefully? That's reaching quite a bit, but I'm having a hard time coming up with anything else that fits their weak reaction.
A better question, to me, is what Google's actions might portend in the business world.
As I understand it, the fearsome legion of Chinese netizens are firmly on Google's side on this one. It's pretty rare for the Chinese to not take the nationalistic side.
Alternate headline: "Google Axes Chinese Search Engine, Redirects Local Users to the Hong Kong Version They've Already Known About for Years" (too wordy?)
Google HK (and the similarly unfiltered Taiwanese version) are pretty common knowledge in China, and as far as I can tell the only change is the addition of a simplified interface on the HK site. (It's always been possible to search simplified Chinese.) Searches on these sites from within China are still subject to the usual restrictions, notably keyword blocks that prevent certain terms from being searched at all. The redirect on .cn is a nice parting jab, but it's not like Google has suddenly removed the wool from millions of Chinese netizens' eyes.
(Oh yeah, and it's not just .cn that redirects to the HK site, it's .com as well. Even my search box sends me to .com.hk now. The other international versions -- Canadian, Australian, UK, etc. -- still operate normally. I haven't found an explanation for this so far.)
The partial blocks all predate the current row. The most bizarre is the Google Docs one, which was implemented in November and only affects spreadsheets. We still have some waiting to do before we'll know just how seriously the government is taking this.
I think it would be interesting if internet traffic were treated the same way that trade is treated by the IMF*: if you don't want to play fair then we're not going to play with you. So, if a country were to start blocking traffic then foreign internet traffic into that country would be subject to a " tariff", perhaps slowed or delayed, or even entirely blocked. That would effectively wreck any economy dependent global trade because it would be impossible to do business with it.
*I mean, in theory and ideally the way the IMF treats trade.
What does the IMF have to do with trade? Are you thinking of the WTO? Even then, the WTO doesn't go around imposing tariffs on countries that don't play by the rules.
Yeah, you lost me there too. Also, what you're suggesting Bill is essentially censorship -- on us. No thanks!
Whoops, yeah, I meant WTO. For those keeping score this was posted after the debate I had in EE about whether to have another Imperial IPA last night (and the IPA won).
What I was thinking is that the same way that the WTO provides a framework for negotiating and regulating trade, including incentives to open trade and disincentives for tariffs, internet access could be regulated in a similar way. Would that mean, in this case, that the rest of the world wouldn't have access to China's net, sure. But just like in a trade dispute the idea is that a single isolated country is far more disadvantaged than the rest who can trade between themselves.
I haven't heard about it anywhere else, but this morning on NPR they were reporting that some nationalist Chinese bloggers are asserting that Google's move is part of a U.S. government plot to undermine Chinese commerce and unity.
In general, I'm not a big fan of either unlimited intellectual property rights or hacking, but in this case, it seems to me that China wants to unilaterally violate everyone's intellectual property rights and hack at other peoples' networks. I haven't seen proof from Google that the attack was indeed from China, but it was widely reported that it was. That portion of the debate seems to be completely ignored by the Chinese partisans.
What would happen, I wonder, if the NSA were actively hacking the hell out of Chinese corporate and defense networks in the way that the Chinese are apparently attacking American corporate and defense networks? Or maybe it's already going on -- I honestly don't know. However, remembering how the Chinese government's feathers were ruffled when they hit an American surveillance plane early in the Bush Administration, I can't see this kind of nationalist bullshit going anywhere good.
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