Google’s new approach to China
Google is finally sick of bending over to China’s demands to censor the Internet and search results. In this bold announcement on their blog today, Google announced that they will be ceasing their much-beloved censorship program at Google.cn.
We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results.
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These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered—combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web—have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
— David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer at Google.
This is great to hear (although not the part about the attacks on the human rights activists). Please read the above post and, if you believe this is a good move on Google’s part, support them in their move to help free China’s people from their “great wall of censorship”.
