Google Stands Ground on Google.cn

nmccart writes "Google gave testimony on Friday to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on International Relations. They discussed their decision to build google.cn in China. Elliot Schrage, the vice president for global communications and public affairs at Google describes how these China-based servers fit in to Google's mantra of 'Don't be evil.' Google hopes to use this as an opportunity to help bring global censorship into the spotlight of American politics. Will it work?"

Re:Picture is worth 1k words

[tpgp]

what exactly is being censored when searching "kazaa?" what should i be seeing that im not? i see kazaa.com as the first result, isn't that the correct site?

The complaint was made by kazaa, not about kazaa.

Scroll to the bottom of the page & you see:

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

Re:Picture is worth 1k words

[kamapuaa]

Your comparison is specious, because what's called the Tianmen Square incident in America is called the 6-4 incident in China. A more fair comparison would be:

http://images.google.cn/images?svnum=10&hl=zh-CN&l r=&cr=countryCN&newwindow=1&q=%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B&b tnG=%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2 [google.cn]

Anyway, Tianmen Square is famous for a number of reasons in China, not just the Tianmen Square incident.

its not .cn NOT com , its .com AND .cn

[ikejam]

I think their basic defense, which seems to be overlooked in this discussion is:

1) google.com was being censored by Chinese authorities anyway.
        a) since this was being done by the government at a third-party level, user experince was far from optimal.

2) google.cn censors keywords, thus maintaining optimum service. censorship is evil but this was happenign anyway.

3) Importantly, google.com is still accessible in China at the same level as it was before. Thus what google is doing is an additional step for imporving service while letting what information that can escape the Great Chinese Firewall through google.com be accessible anyway.

Thats my understanding anyway. Correct me if im wrong...

Re:The most telling admission

[Retric]

"Even though we weren't doing any self-censorship, our results were being filtered anyway, and our service was being actively degraded on top of that."

"Our search results were being filtered; our service was being crippled; our users were flocking to local Chinese alternatives; and, ultimately, Chinese Internet users had less access to information than they would have had."

"we decided to try a different path, a path rooted in the very pragmatic calculation that we could provide more access to more information to more Chinese citizens more reliably"

By adding google.cn they get to "give notification to Chinese users whenever search results have been removed. ", "Protection of user privacy" and for whatever good it does they will keep google.com running.

I don't see what else they could have done. They could simply write off china but that means a lot of users are going to be stuck with shitty products. Making that kind of political statement might have done some good but I don't see how providing google.cn is evil. If anything it brings to whole issue to light as apposed to the issue as some dark code on a few routers.

Re:Picture is worth 1k words

[dfgchgfxrjtdhgh.jjhv]

it was a complaint by kazaa, about kazaa-lite infringing their copyright. kazaa lite is censored, worldwide, despite the fact that the DMCA only applies in the USA. there are several other sites censored, worldwide, because google is obeying US law, even in countries where it doesnt apply. use this link to find other examples of censorship - http://www.chillingeffects.org/search.cgi [chillingeffects.org] if you search for google, you'll notice several governments are keen to censor google search results, but only us censorship applies worldwide.

Also in Germany

[Beuno]

Everybody should note that they also block search terms in Germnay and France.

Re:Google.cn

[DJCacophony]

- Chinese users who attempt to access google.com from china are redirected to google.cn, without an option to not be.

- Chinese users cannot use proxies to access google.com because the proxies are blocked, as well as many proxy sites.

Re:Google.cn

[cyranose]

I've heard that it was temporarily redirected, but I'm not sure if that's China's doing or Google's (China was previously redirecting Google.com to other search engines). According to Google's official statement, Google.com is as available there as possible. If they are lying, it would surprise me.

There are other ways of offering proxies that people are working on. There is no perfect solution thus far.

Re:The most telling admission

[metamatic]

...and certainly not anything involving death.

Uh, Tiananmen Square? Remember?

Re:The most telling admission

[feijai]

And Google's involvement to Tiananmen is?

In erasing it from the collective memory of the Chinese. Compare American Google [google.com] with Chinese Google [google.cn]. Echos of 1984 indeed.