Copied from Zen newsletter (Issue 60, feb 1st, 2006)

GOOGLE FIREWALL OF CHINA
Responding to criticism from Amnesty International and others, CEO Eric Schmidt defended Google's acquiescence to censorship of its search engine results in China, saying "we weren't wild about the restrictions, but it was even worse to not try to serve those users at all. We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil". Columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin has launched an effort to collect various Photoshopped Google logos and other images that protest Google's acceptance of the Chinese government's censorship. An early entry in the collection has an image of the Google logo sporting the old Soviet Union's hammer and sickle emblem, with a Google 'search page' showing the results of a query for "Tiananmen Square Massacre", in which the hapless search giant suggests an alternative query: "Did you mean: please arrest me and take me to re-education camp?"

what do you think? right or wrong?

Blog/Column Gallery

Debate

__________________

I've never been the world's biggest fan of Google because of some of its practices (placing cookies with stupidly long expiry dates on the hard-drive etc) so this really doesn't surprise me. As the article said, they're talking out of both sides of their mouth. They want the internet to be free to everyone but they're willing to bow down to China's requests as China is the second largest user of the internet. And there's a lot of money to be made there. So Google aren't likely to turn down the offer, even if it means gagging its users. But there are ways that China's internet users can bypass the Google firewalling. There are sites that use different proxies and hide IP addresses. I don't think this firewalling is right but what can you expect from a money grabbing corporation?

__________________