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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.
Uncharitably I wondered if Google’s decision had anything to do with its failure to acquire baidu.com, but that fell through so long ago that I can’t really connect the two events together.
I ended up doing some further research on China and internet in China on a whim and ended up finding more than I really wanted to. It’s hard to imagine that Google and Wikipedia would not reign supreme all over the world, but China has their own number one search engine and Wikipedia equivalent and naturally both are carefully pruned for “malefic” content.
This is an interesting, if somewhat disturbing, read about the history of Internet in China. The summation of it is that the government in China has been permitting the internet to grow only as quickly as they can develop the technology to monitor it and keep their vise-grip on what shows up to the citizens. Primarily the problem is in that the Chinese people have zero ability to maintain their anonymity when trawling the web.
For years, China’s Internet users have been required to register with local police, and the regime hasn’t hesitated to arrest and detain anyone who is found to have accessed or distributed banned material. New laws come along quite quickly when the regime concludes they’re needed. For example, many chat room participants log on using the Internet bars and cafes that are proliferating throughout China. A spate of regulations announced in January 1999 require the owners of Internet bars and cafes to register with local police, prevent customers from engaging in activities harmful to state security and monitor their users’ on-line usage; they will be held personally responsible for infractions originating from their premises (Ribao 1999).
This is on top of China’s tendency to disrupt service to US-hosted resources when convenient to them, which makes Chinese users think the website is unreliable and huge drops in usage end up occurring.
According to the latter article, though I guess it needs some updating… apparently China has once in the past (or perhaps still; I can’t really check) blocked both icanhascheezburger and cuteoverload. Really, guys? Really?
On the plus side, should there be one, porn is considered to be “banned material”, as well as inflammatory material (mostly about the government, but also racial or ethnic hatred). Does that mean the Chinese internet is actually squeaky clean and relatively troll-free? >_>
