Google Blocked in China
So what else is new? Happened all the time while I was there. Hopefully, this will put to rights some of the debate on Google - it's the Party that's censoring, not Google.
However, the fact that Google offers a censored version to replace the service that is blocked does raise some ethical questions. Did the US company know in advance that it would be be blocked - and how permanent will it be?
Reporters Sans Frontiers report below.
Reporters Without Borders / Internet Freedom desk
GOOGLE.COM BLOCKED AS VICE TIGHTENS ON CHINESE INTERNET USERS
Reporters Without Borders today condemned the current unprecedented level of Internet filtering in China, which means the Google.com search engine can no longer be accessed in most provinces - although the censored Chinese version, Google.cn, is still accessible - and software designed in the United States to get round censorship now only works with great difficulty.
The organisation also deplored the fact that the 17th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June has been used to tighten the vice on Chinese Internet users.
"It was only to be expected that Google.com would be gradually sidelined after the censored version was launched in January," Reporters Without Borders said. "Google has just definitively joined the club of western companies that comply with online censorship in China. It is deplorable that Chinese Internet users are forced to wage a technological war against censorship in order to access banned content."
Internet users in many major Chinese cities have had difficulty in connecting to the uncensored international version of Google for the past week. The search engine was totally unaccessible throughout the country on 31 May. The blocking then gradually extended to Google News and Google Mail. So the Chinese public is now reduced to using the censored Chinese versions of these services.
At the same time, the authorities have largely managed to neutralise software designed to sidestep censorship since 24 May. Such software as Dynapass, Ultrasurf, Freegate and Garden Networks is normally used by about 100,000 people in China to gain access to news and information that his blocked by the firewall isolating China from the rest of the worldwide web.
Bill Xia, the US-based exile who created Dynapass, said the jamming of these programmes had reached an unprecedented level and he was convinced the authorities were deploying considerable hardware and software resources to achieve it.
Software engineers based aboard have been trying to update these programmes on the basis of information they have received from Internet users inside China. A new version of Dynapass was released a few days ago, but its effectiveness is still extremely limited.
Comments
The blocking of Google in China plays into the Party's hand. First, they get google to establish a censored .cn domain and then they block the uncensored .com domain.
I predict that google.com will be increasingly unavailable as time go forward. Chinese net surfers will be forced to use either one of the state controlled search engines or google.com, both censored.
Google has backtracked slightly; in a recent report Brin said that perhaps google should have taken the more principled road. Strange how Brin needed hindsight to make that observation when so many others believed it going in.
Posted by: dave | June 7, 2006 1:57 PM