Google censures itself

[ftvfatboy]

Google censures itself
Breaking tradition, google goes against spirit of 'Freedom Of Expression.'


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.

[davebutler]

wow thats crazy
didnt think google would do that