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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.
The photo of the student confronting tanks isn't a national security risk.
So they won't have to filter that.
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
Let's hope China does no evil.
"Cats like plain crisps"
They didn't bow at all. In Google's own words in the article's comment section: This piece suggests that Google has "bowed" to censorship. That is not correct. We have been very clear about our committment 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 Lucinda Barlow, Head of Public Affairs, Google AU/NZ - July 21, 2010, 2:43PM
Personally, I don't trust one word of what comes from China's propagandists. Does anyone know of any press release from Google about this?
So much for do no evil.
To be fair, when I search for the (WARNING, graphic images) taboo words on the HK site they take me to from Google.cn, I find the "social stability" threatening images linked to by Google.
If bowing to China is making the user take a single additional click from the google.cn landing page and bringing them right to unfiltered internet searches, that's some pretty lame bowing. I guess if both parties are happy and the Chinese people can very easily get to unfiltered search then I'm happy. Or does Google's Hong Kong search work differently inside China? If it works the same way as I see, I don't know how you could consider that evil. I perceive that Google has succeeded in granting the people of greater China with unfiltered search if they can tolerate an additional mouse click. This is assuming the Great Firewall of China or some government monitoring agency isn't watching these Google.cn -> Google.hk transactions.
How is attempting to bring unfiltered search to the people of China evil?
My work here is dung.
As The Wired already explained a couple of days ago ( http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/07/google-china-fiction/ ) what Google and Chinese government agreed on is pure fiction. Google doesn't redirect Chinese users to the Honk Kong search engine automatically, but there is a button to easily switch and google.hk is left uncensored in China, meaning that the Chinese can still search Google without filtering. The article linked by Slashdot as the source presents the Chinese official version of the story which obviously hides the above fact.
Polish your GNU/Linux! http://polishlinux.org
Do you even know what's happened? Just visit the google.cn page will ya? The whole thing's a bit button that takes you to an uncensored site.
Bowing to censorship my ass! If that's bowing to censorship, then more of us need to do the same!
So if google is filtering "material deemed a threat to national security or social stability" from within China. Can we on the outside set it up so we can only browse the material that would be filtered within China. I think it would be educational to browse a volume of material that was "deemed a threat to national security or social stability" of China, it might also be a source of much amusement.
I agree completely. This is a clever albeit transparent trick on the part of Google to let Chinese save face. Make no mistake, China didn't want Google to leave completely, that would've been an international PR disaster (apart from the job loss and other collateral damages). Naturally, Google didn't want to go either, loosing all the business opportunities in China. Most importantly, those services that they don't have to filter anyway, like music, product search, etc. So Google pretended to do something and yield to the Chinese government's demands, and China gladly accepted this opportunity to get out of this impasse (their license to operate in China covers everything, not only search). There's a reason I use pretended - I mean what Google did is very very close to nothing, just check out http://www.google.cn/ - and click anywhere on the screen. This "concession" is a joke, and it was a dangerous gamble on Google's part, since depending on how you look at it, this can be seen as China loosing face (actually bowing to Google's demands) instead the other way around. It also shows the kind of bargaining power Google has. For what exactly did China gain? Well, see for yourself, just goo ahead and visit google.cn and search for something :))
Well, from Beijing:
surfing to http://google.cn/ will show you something that looks like google's homepage, only, it's just an image of the homepage. Clicking on it will lead you to google.com.hk. (the version in simplified Chinese characters)
What changed a couple of weeks back is that they do not redirect you automatically, you just end up on this landing page.
Interesting to note: passing a query directly to google.cn (from the search box in firefox), will just execute the query on google.com.hk
They are NOT censoring. *All* the search are still done in the UNCENSORED HK version. All they did was turn a automatic redirect into a full page link, effectively a loophole to comply with the letter of the law but not with the intent of the Chinese government.
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