For the past few weeks, there has been trouble brewing in China. Google, the American based search engine company, has publicly stated that they intend to no longer censor the search results in China as required by the Chinese government.

Since the spotlight was on China during the 2008 Olympics, many have reported how the Chinese government has attempted to and in most cases successfully censored all forms of media in some way. Up until this point, Google followed these restrictions and added certain censors / filters to their search results that prevented users from viewing information as requested by the Chinese government.

The dispute surfaced two weeks ago when Google had reported that “it and other companies were the target of cyber-attacks originating in China aimed at gaining access to the e-mail of Chinese advocates for human rights.” Although Google has no absolute proof, they believe the origin of these attacks stem from the Chinese government.

These attacks have caused Google to change their stance on the government censorship of its search results in China, in addition to the fact that this form of censorship directly contradicts Google’s mission to provide the most relevant search results. Although the two sides are still trying to resolve the issues, it is very possible that Google may pull all operations out of China and discontinue its search service. Other possibilities include the Chinese government requiring all Chinese ISP’s to block the content in question thus removing the responsibility from Google, or they could require the ISP’s to block any Google search engine or search result page.

What is your stance?

Tags: google

Categories: News