Critics attack Google's 'black day' in China
By Simon Freeman and Dan Sabbagh
Google today caved in to pressure from the Chinese Government by launching a localised version of its website that self-censors information deemed "subversive" by the Communist authorities.
The company, whose motto is "Don?t be evil", has engineered its search facilities to restrict Chinese people from searching for information such as Tibetan independence or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
"In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on Google.cn, in response to local law, regulation or policy," the internet company said in a statement issued yesterday.
Google insiders acknowledge that the company is likely to be criticised for its actions. Its motivation is partly a need to restore its declining market share in China and partly a hope that providing a restricted service will help to unleash information in the country.
Andrew McLaughlin, a senior policy lawyer for Google based in New York, suggested that the decision amounted to the lesser of two evils.
"While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information is more inconsistent with our mission," he said.
It was severely criticised by human rights organisations. Reporters Sans Frontieres, the Paris-based press freedom watchdog, said that the launch of Google.cn represented a "black day" for free speech.
A spokesman said: "Freedom of expression isn?t a minor principle that can be pushed aside when dealing with a dictatorship. 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."
The search terms blocked will include what are known as the "the three t?s and the two c?s": references to Taiwanese or Tibetan independence, the Tiananmen massacre, cult-related searches, which may trigger reference to the banned Falun Gong organisation, and information about Communist party supremacy.
Google is already subject to Chinese government censorship, which blocks search results returning undesired information. The country maintains a sophisticated system of internet monitoring ? known as "The Great Firewall of China" ? that restricts access to a range of Western sites.
The company estimates that about 1,000 search catagories are blocked by this filtering. No published list of barred terms exists, although the authorities are quick to complain if offending information becomes available.
As a result of the filtering, access to Google?s website is slowed down, and its position is under threat from Baidu, a Chinese company that is the local market leader. According to research published last July, Google had a share of about 28 per cent and falling, while Baidu?s share was just over 40 per cent and rising.
Until now, Google has held out from doing a deal in China, while rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft, owner of MSN Search, have shown a willingness to compromise with the authorities.
Last year Yahoo! provided information that helped to jail a dissident for ten years, after he used a Yahoo! e-mail to relay the contents of a secret government order. In December, Microsoft closed down a political blogger?s site, arguing that he had failed to comply with local laws.
Seeking to avert these types of dispute, Google will not introduce a version of its e-mail or blog software for the time being.
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