Joseph Kahn has this item in Sunday’s New York Times that puts more heat on Google’s decision to cooperate with the Chinese government in censoring search engine results. While Kahn notes that other Internet companies play ball with the restrictive regime, he fingers Google as being the worst culprit in perpetuating the oppressive system of censorship.
Several of the biggest media and technology companies have come under attack for helping the Chinese government police the Web. Yahoo provided information about its users’ e-mail accounts that helped the authorities convict dissidents in 2003 and 2005, Chinese lawyers say. Microsoft closed a popular blog it hosted that offended Chinese censors. Cisco has sold equipment that helps Beijing restrict access to Web sites it considers subversive. But few have cooperated as openly as Google. Google’s local staff works closely with Chinese officials to ensure that search results from Google.cn do not include information, images or links to Web sites that the government does not want its people to see.
While Google gets credit elsewhere for at least noting results that have been censored, thus giving the user some inkling that something’s missing, the article raises the notion that Google’s new censored service, Google.cn, is a step backwards for the Mountain View-based search giant. The old Google produced unworkable links when the user pulled up censored results, letting the user know that information existed but was simply unobtainable.
Now, however, users aren’t even really sure when information is available or not.
“It was one thing when you hit on links that did not work. You could see what was blocked,” said Liu Xiaobo, a leading dissident writer. “The new Google hides the hand of the censor.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 11:30 PM|Comments(0)
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