Google Says No To Internet Censorship In China

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Source: Google Blog
 

I applaud Google’s stance in standing up to a repressive government. They may lose out financially from advertising revenue and the mobile phone market given that there are more than 300 million consumers in China.

But then Google will score points elsewhere for their principle in not controlling what people can read.

In the long term though, it matters little whether Google exits the China market. The critical issue is whether Google can continue to come up with winners and stay relevant to keep its existing customers.

There are a lot of things which need fine-tuning, not least the Nexus One, which is seriously, no great shakes.

Paul is a geek who shares his thoughts on technology, gadgets, social networks and football in this blog. Stay in touch with his updates by subscribing to the RSS feeds or Email. Thanks for visiting Seventoten and leaving a comment.  To change this standard text, you have to enter some information about your self in the Dashboard -> Users -> Your Profile box.