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Google.cn Still Remains In China
hackingbear writes "Google appears to be content to remain in China doing business as usual while it finds a way to work within the system, according to one of the search giant's founders. This despite a strong statement 30 days ago that it would stop censoring search results in China and possibly pull its business out of that country. And the company is still unwilling to confirm or deny if the alleged attacks were carried out by the Chinese government. 'I don't actually think the question of whether [the attacks were performed by] the Chinese government is that important,' Brin said. (That's the difference between state-sponsor vs. individual hacking. Why is that not important?) In the mean time, shortly after we celebrated google.cn lifting censorship, the exact same censorship has been quietly re-enabled as proved by this Chinese search query on June 4, despite the lack of any concrete actions by the Chinese government, which has so far made only useless general and standard statements on the matter."
It's true that the tank man does not rank number one on "tiananmen" as it does on google.com - but if I type tiananmen into the search box, the top suggestions are
tiananmen square protest
tiananmen square 1989
tiananmen square tank
tiananmen tank
tiananmen square tank man
tiananmen tank man
And if I make the search more specific by adding "tank", I do get a few copies of the infamously censored image on page 1, even on Google.cn.
Of course, I haven't digged this deeply before, so I don't know if the censorship was always this half-assed.
Foreign executives being arrested for political reasons? Sounds like they should be clamoring over each other on the roof to get a spot on the last chopper out of Beijing. Not a slow scaling-back of operations.