News: Google launches censored version of its search-engine

Reporters Without Borders today accused the Internet’s biggest
search-engine, Google, of "hypocrisy" for its plan to launch a
censured version of its product in China, meaning that the country’s
Internet users would only be able to look up material approved of by
the government and nothing about Tibet or democracy and human rights
in China.

"The launch of Google.cn is a black day for freedom of expression in
China," the worldwide press freedom organisation said. "The firm
defends the rights of US Internet users before the US government but
fails to defend its Chinese users against theirs.

"Google’s statements about respecting online privacy are the
height of hypocrisy in view of its strategy in China. Like its
competitors, the company says it has no choice and must obey Chinese
laws, but this is a tired argument. Freedom of expression isn’t a
minor principle that can be pushed aside when dealing with a
dictatorship. It’s a principle recognised by the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and features in the Chinese national
constitution itself.

"US firms are now bending to the same censorship rules as their
Chinese competitors but they continue to justify themselves by saying
their presence has a long-term benefit. Yet the Internet in China is
becoming more and more isolated from the outside world and freedom of
expression there is shrinking. These firms’ lofty predictions about
the future of a free and limitless Internet conveniently hide their
unacceptable moral errors,"<!–
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\n
\nThe California-based Google announced on the 26th of January it would\nsoon launch a China-based Google.cn to improve and speed up its\nservice for Chinese customers. It admitted it would be censored in\nline with Chinese law but said that while such filtering was against\nits principles, it was much better that not providing any service at\nall.
\n
\nUp to now, Google has only censored its news site, Google News, by\nremoving material from sources banned by the Chinese authorities. It\nhas not censored its standard US-based search-engine, accessible at\nhttp://www.google.com/intl/zh-CN, and is the last of the world\’s major\nsearch-engines not to have done so inside China. Yahoo ! has been\nworking with Chinese censors for more than three years.
\n
\nBy offering a version without "subversive" content, Google is\nmaking it easier for Chinese officials to filter the Internet\nthemselves. A website not listed by search-engines has little chance\nof being found by users. The new Google version means that even if a\nhuman rights publication is not blocked by local firewalls, it has no\nchance of being read in China.
\n
\nReporters Without Borders wrote to Google founders Larry Page and\nSergey Brin in May last year asking if they were going to censor their\ntool for the Chinese market and expressing concern at some recent\nGoogle decisions.
\n
\nIn July 2004, the firm took a share in the Chinese firm Baidu, which\noperates a highly-censored search-engine. Soon afterwards, Google was\nallowed to open an office in China under a conditional agreement with\nthe authorities.
\n
\nReporters Without Borders published six recommendations on 6 January\nfor ensuring that Internet firms respect freedom of expression when\nworking in repressive countries.
\n
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