China Says Google Pledged To Obey Censorship Demands

bonhomme_de_neige writes "China renewed Google's internet license after it pledged to obey censorship laws and stop automatically switching mainland users to its unfiltered Hong Kong site, an official said. Google promised to 'obey Chinese law' and avoid linking to material deemed a threat to national security or social stability, said Zhang Feng, director of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's Telecoms Development Department, at a news conference." Update: 07/21 21:56 GMT by S : Changed headline to reflect that this is mainly just China trying to paint a better picture of the outcome. In a comment on the linked article, a Google representative said, "This piece suggests that Google has 'bowed' to censorship. That is not correct. We have been very clear about our committment [sic] to not censor our products for users in China. The products we have kept on Google.cn (Music, Translate, Product Search) do not require any censorship by Google. Other products, like web search, we are offering from Google.com.hk, and without censorship." If you go to google.cn, you can see the prominent link to the Hong Kong version of the site.

Comments

Not true

[Lomegor]

Although China did say that Google is censoring its web search, it's just not true. If you go to google.cn you can see that there is an image which takes you to Google Hong Kong. Even if you RTFA all through the comments you can see the answer from a Google PR person answering to his issue saying that they are NOT censoring web search, and that the only products which remain in China are those that can exist without censorship. This is just the Chinese government trying to make it appear as if they won. That is NOT true. Again, you can't search on google.cn and google.com.hk is not censored