Article by George Norman

On 17 Mar 2010

After uncovering a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” on its corporate infrastructure, attack that originated from China, Mountain View-based search engine giant Google announced it would no longer put up with the restrictions imposed by the Chinese government. To be more precise, Google.cn has to censor search results to comply with the Chinese legislation. Google said it would no longer put up with this and if the authorities do not let it stop censoring search results, then Google will have to “review the feasibility of [its] business operations in China”.

As a matter of fact, earlier this week we reported that Google is about 99% ready to pull out of China after negotiations with the authorities came to a standstill. Google would not budge on the “we want to stop censoring search results” bit, while the authorities would not budge on the “if you do not censor search results you’re breaking the law and you will suffer the consequences” bit.


Despite repeated warnings from the Chinese authorities, it seems that Google is indeed pulling the plug on censoring search results. A trickle of previously censored material can now be accessed via a Google search in China, according to the MSNBC.

“Web sites dealing with subjects such as the Tiananmen Square democracy protests, Tibet and regional independence movements could all be accessed through Google's Chinese search engine Tuesday, after the company said it would no longer abide by Beijing's censorship rules. Despite a report in the China Daily that Google China was still filtering content on its search engine and the firm's own insistence that its policies had not changed, people in Beijing found that it wasn't necessarily the case,” said Adrienne Mong, MSNBC.

When contacted, Google spokesperson Scott Rubin said that nothing has changed – Google’s search results in China are censored just like they’ve always been.

Moving on, you might already know that the Chinese authorities do not let web surfers access certain websites – such as popular social networking site Facebook, popular video sharing site YouTube, online database of everything movie-related IMDB, social networking and micro-blogging site Twitter, and a whole lot of other sites.

The newest site to be put behind the Great Firewall of China and thus become inaccessible to Chinese internauts is IsoHunt. The Canada-based torrent site, according to TorrentFreak, has seen a 99% drop in traffic from Chinese visitors. This I the first time that a torrent site is placed behind the Great Firewall. The authorities did crack down on file-sharing sites in the past, but until now they only targeted local sites.



Tags: Google, China, Censorhip, Torrent, IsoHunt, Great Firewall of China

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