You might be aware of Google looking to get out of China because of reservations Google has on censorship and cyber attacks emanating from China which has prompted Google to think about closing down Google China. There were some debate in the past couple of months but finally as expected Google has finally acted on censorship in Google China.
How it started?
Google’s service Gmail had come under cyber attacks under which Google announced that certain accounts were hacked into to attack Chinese activist. Some of these activists are not in China and hence could open a can of worms legally speaking for Google. This is where Google started negotiating with China to take off censorship to its services.
Google uncensored search results for China…
Google yesterday re-routed their servers to host Google China or rather re-routed traffic from Google.cn to Google.com.hk which will give access to Chinese users to get unfiltered and uncensored results. Google claims that this is perfectly legal in their blog. They also have put up another webpage which shows which Google service in China is up and running. You can access that service by clicking here. At the time of writing this post, You Tube, Blogger and Google Sites was blocked completely.
What does this mean for Google?
Google is the first company to challenge censorship in such a direct way in China and that will be difficult. I think Google is taking this extreme step as too much of their systems are open to China so they can be monitored. This also renders the security of their services outside China as under scrutiny. In other words I think Google thinks if it toes the China line, they might be endangering their services outside China to Chinese hackers.
This might be quite a interesting development. What do you think? Will Google be completely shut out from China or will China finally cave in and give in to some demands of the internet giant.
Do drop in your comments and views.
Link: Google Blog