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Thursday, February 02, 2006

More on Google.cn

The Official Google Blog has been updated with a post containing the statement submitted by Andrew McLaughlin, Senior Policy Council for Google, to the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus on "Human Rights and the Internet -- The People's Republic of China" to be held today. Mr. McLaughlin will not be able to attend the event in person, however his statement details the reasons behind Google’s decision to provide localized (and restricted) versions of their search, news and image services in China as well as some of Google’s views on information controls and how they are handled, and should be handled in future. This statement is basically a rewording of the earlier post on the topic on this blog, so there’s really nothing new. They again defend their position, though state that they do not feel the situation is ideal and admit their approach was an unfortunate compromise.

Take it as you will. I still maintain my stance on the situation.

2 comments:

Flint said...

Well no, not entirely. ISPs in China are required to run all 'external' data that goes through their systems through filters, this slows access to many outside sites down to a crawl (including google.com), which is why google wanted a local presence that would not need to be filtered (since any site hosted locally has to comply with government regulations, and needn't be filtered). So even with ADSL connections, it's still difficult, if not impossible, for Chinese citizens to access certain information-and access to that information is tracked at the ISP level.

Flint said...

Yup, their controls are nasty. And it doesn't stop with internet access either, we'd (smallfry) really like to get our games onto the Chinese market, but the government stipulates that all such software's code must be made available for their perusal, so they can ensure there is nothing malicious or contrary to their regulations in it. Fat bloody chance.

 

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