They may have stood up to the Feds, but the Mandarins won this battle… Google.cn is to censor all searches in China.
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1694294,00.html
This is as much though because of commercial pressures as pressure from Beijing…
Google is a private enterprise. Its job is to deliver shareholder value as well as services. This it does by increasing its user base worldwide.
They were offering a clear feed from US-based servers but the Chinese make links to these slower – so Google were losing market share in CN to a local Chinese search engine (which presumably accepts the national laws regarding censorship).
There are a lot of Chinese net users! If they dug their heels in and pulled out of China, Googles investors would whinge that they have simply “walked away from a lucrative piece of business”, and that every other company operating in China has complied with the national law of a sovereign nation. Ironically many of these investors are in Western countries!
Google has also removed services that could get people in trouble such as blogging etc, but this is as much a potential damage limitation exercise as they know the Chinese security services will get court orders for any data they see on blogs etc they wish to investigate further..
A good example of how a “free market” doesn’t guarantee “freedom of speech and expression” – and how much power China is getting worldwide these days..
incidentally anyone know what happened to the “open directory” project which was supposed to be an “open source/non commercial” search engine?
