In what could be termed as a death blow to spirit of 'Freedom Of Expression', google has toed the Chinese Government line, by starting a new Google China Service.
This service would be accesible to all chinese user's at http://www.google.cn, only condition would be that all the searches made would be censured, that is thousand's of words and websites which the Government of China feels are not appropriate for it's citizens to view would not be avaliable to the user as otherwise normally would be avaliable to their couterparts around the world.
China is world's second biggest internet market and google did not want to get in the bad books of the government. Also rumour has it that a local search giant Baidu was fast catching up with google.
Google also confirmed that it will also not offer its Gmail email service, web log publishing services or chat rooms as they might end up being tools of self expression which it so desires to avoid. Instead, it said it would initially offer four of its core services  website and image search, Google News and local search.
This move has raised many eyebrows as it comes less than a week after Google resisted the US Justice Department's efforts to get information about commonly used sex search terms.
While this action may be "inconsistent with Google's mission", it says it would have concerns for the safety of its few dozen employees located in China.
In what's been a normal practice in China, sites outside China often suffer slowdowns or are blocked under a system  nicknamed the "great firewall"  in which the web in China is walled off from the global internet. This allows the Chinese government to both actively censor what citizens can see.
Hot topics might include issues like independence for Taiwan or Tibet or outlawed spiritual group Falun Gong.
"China is the most repressive censorship regime on the internet," said John Palfrey, one of the principal investigators on a joint university research project on global internet censorship known as the OpenNet Initiative. He estimates that through both active and passive censorship tens of thousands of search terms are blocked for web users inside China.
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Update:
Google goes a step forward
Google's China Service not only censors many Web sites that question the Chinese government, but in a shocking and bizarre move blocks access to topics such as teen pregnancy, homosexuality, dating, beer and jokes.
Google also did a U-Turn on its promise to inform users when their search results are censored. The fact is the company frequently filters out sites without revealing it.
Google tried to pass on the blame by saying that some web site blockages were human errors which must be expected when any new service is first introduced, and others represented a its concerted attempt to comply with Chinese censorship laws.
The so called buggy Chinese filtering stands out as a rare case for a company that prides itself on superior search technology, has a $126 billion market capitalization and boasts on its payroll one of the world's highest concentrations of computer science doctoral degrees.
This service would be accesible to all chinese user's at http://www.google.cn, only condition would be that all the searches made would be censured, that is thousand's of words and websites which the Government of China feels are not appropriate for it's citizens to view would not be avaliable to the user as otherwise normally would be avaliable to their couterparts around the world.
China is world's second biggest internet market and google did not want to get in the bad books of the government. Also rumour has it that a local search giant Baidu was fast catching up with google.
Google also confirmed that it will also not offer its Gmail email service, web log publishing services or chat rooms as they might end up being tools of self expression which it so desires to avoid. Instead, it said it would initially offer four of its core services  website and image search, Google News and local search.
This move has raised many eyebrows as it comes less than a week after Google resisted the US Justice Department's efforts to get information about commonly used sex search terms.
While this action may be "inconsistent with Google's mission", it says it would have concerns for the safety of its few dozen employees located in China.
In what's been a normal practice in China, sites outside China often suffer slowdowns or are blocked under a system  nicknamed the "great firewall"  in which the web in China is walled off from the global internet. This allows the Chinese government to both actively censor what citizens can see.
Hot topics might include issues like independence for Taiwan or Tibet or outlawed spiritual group Falun Gong.
"China is the most repressive censorship regime on the internet," said John Palfrey, one of the principal investigators on a joint university research project on global internet censorship known as the OpenNet Initiative. He estimates that through both active and passive censorship tens of thousands of search terms are blocked for web users inside China.
________________________________
Update:
Google goes a step forward
Google's China Service not only censors many Web sites that question the Chinese government, but in a shocking and bizarre move blocks access to topics such as teen pregnancy, homosexuality, dating, beer and jokes.
Google also did a U-Turn on its promise to inform users when their search results are censored. The fact is the company frequently filters out sites without revealing it.
Google tried to pass on the blame by saying that some web site blockages were human errors which must be expected when any new service is first introduced, and others represented a its concerted attempt to comply with Chinese censorship laws.
The so called buggy Chinese filtering stands out as a rare case for a company that prides itself on superior search technology, has a $126 billion market capitalization and boasts on its payroll one of the world's highest concentrations of computer science doctoral degrees.
