Chinese authorities are satisfied with Google’s tweaks to the Chinese version of its search engine.
It might be the end to a long saga, which started with Google’s announcement of possible withdrawal from China in the name of free speech, and culminated with Google killing off its Chinese search engine and redirecting visitors to their uncensored, Hong Kong search engine.
However, the Chinese authorities weren’t happy with this solution, threatening they wouldn’t renew Google’s ICP license, which would mean Google wouldn’t be able to operate as a search engine in China. Finally, instead of automatically redirecting traffic, Google changed its strategy and started displaying a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk. This, it seems, was enough to pacify the Chinese authorities.
“After examination, we have concluded that it has basically met the requirements according to the relevant laws and regulations,” said Zhang Feng, head of the ministry’s communication development division, at a news conference.
Now that the dispute is (seemingly) over, one has to take a good look at what, exactly, Google has managed to achieve with this episode. I’m afraid that, besides raising some awareness to the free speech and censorship issues in China, the answer is: not very much.
Google stood by its decision not to censor search results in China. However, the impact of Google’s initial statement waned off in the months of back-and-forth between the search giant and the Chinese authorities.
What has changed? Not Chinese laws on censorship. Google’s search engine is now a landing page (an image mimicking the look of a search engine, actually) with a link to another search engine which the Chinese authorities can block at will. Furthermore, although the search results at Google.com.hk are uncensored, the Great Firewall of China (or the Golden Shield Project, the censorship and surveillance project operated by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security) can still block access to the links found through that search engine.
We congratulate Google on their initial bold statement on censorship and the decision to stop censoring search results in China. Dozens of little tweaks later, however, and the final compromise reached between Google and China hardly feels like a revolution.
More About: china, free speech, Google
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