China Censure Google
Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2006 11:36 pm
I'm not sure, Clancy. It provides a faster access to mainland China users, but it won't reduce the effort needed by the authorities there in the slightest. The government filters will still need to be just as comprehensive and maintained as they are at the moment. I'm in England, but I can choose to search either through google.co.uk or through google.com, and I get to choose which engine to use - the .com doesn't reflect me back to the local servers, though they default to doing that unless I override. Beyond that I could be using an anonymising system anywhere on the planet. Were I in China, I could have my brother in Germany host a private proxy for me and Google through that, even if Google end up locking out the non-chinese servers one day (though the article explicitly says that they're not doing that at the moment). So, given that Google wins by speeding responsivity, and that the full search capability is still there, it's not so much a sellout as face-saving.