Google agrees to censorship for Chinese

[Jamey]

Google's launch of a new, self-censored search engine in China is a "black day" for freedom of expression, a leading international media watchdog says.

Read full story: Google move 'black day' for China (Source: BBC News)

 

I saw a feature about censorship in China on BBC's only technology TV programme, previously called "Click Online" but recently changed to just "Click". They showed how many websites we would consider fine to browse are considered incorrect or unlawful by the Chinese authorities. For instance, the BBC News site simply isn't accessible from China.

 

Crazy, huh? It's wrong to be judgemental but with 1.3 billion people living there, you might've expected a few to revolt and demand censorship to be stopped. Then again, with 1.3 billion people there's probably such a variety they find no need to discover much about the 'banned topics'. What do you think?

[kthdsn]

It seems to me that the issue is with china and not with google. China is a horrible oppressive place and everything there seems to be highly controlled and censored by its government. If google had to choose between not providing a chinese service or providing a censored one then they have made the right choices. At least they are making it clear to the users when and if their results have been filtered.

 

I hope that the rest of the world doesn't pin the issue on google because that could cause other companies to introduce censorship in other countries, following "googles example". It would totally suck if the internet became censored.

[Josh]

I think there was a rebbellion at censorship and it turned out to be a massacre. You may remember the guy being run over by the tank.....

[lodzinski]

ah tienemen sq. (sp) you can't find anything about that on google.cn ironically. Big mistake by google - 13000000000000 dollers were wiped off the share price in ONE day after they announced they were cencoring the interweb.