Google Stops Censoring Search Results in China
By Partho, Gaea News NetworkWednesday, January 13, 2010
Google’s announcement to halt censoring search results for Chinese website and its anticipative revelations to eventually pull out of China was met with much noise. The revelation comes in wake of the major cyber attack on Gmail last month. The Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists were targeted last December in the hacking attempt.
In particular, Google has willingly allowed self-censored its search results since January 27, 2006, on its Google China service. The screenshot above show an example of this, where a search for tiananmen on Google China (on the left) doesn’t bring up protest pictures as you get when searching for the same thing on Google’s main site at Google.com.
In 2006, Google allowed users to self-censor its search results, on its Google China service. According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Google had developed an evil scale to weigh if it was better to be a little evil in censoring for the bigger good in bringing information to the Chinese people.
With the situation worsening after the hacking attempts Google realized that it should effectively pull out of the censorship. After investigating attacks on Gmail service Google realized that cooperating on censorship makes no sense.
Google provides the details of the attacks, which has enough evidence to support the acquisition. It turns out to be the worst coordinated attack on 20 companies in a variety of industries. According to Google the attacks were primarily targeted to compromise the Gmail accounts of human rights activists. They finally resolved not to censor their search results for their servers in China.
What’s important is implications of Google’s withdrawal. Straightaway, the decision would offer Yahoo and Microsoft an opportunity to gain share in a huge market; given they are willing to continue censoring their sites.
The recent developments could bring the company bad publicity and a potential backlash.
The companies often justified their moves saying that these were necessary for business in China. There are speculations that Google pull out might have been effected by Baidu’s domination in China. However, Google’s decision might be influenced by the argument - engagement is better than isolation.
