For two months, speculation has run high about whether Google would make good on its threat to pull out of China if the government didn’t ease up on its Internet censorship requirements. Now, Google thinks it’s found a better solution.
The search giant on Monday announced that it will redirect traffic to its Chinese site to Hong Kong in an effort to provide unfiltered access to the Web in mainland China. Google’s top lawyer calls it a “sensible solution” to a tricky problem. Datamation has the story.
Ending two months of speculation, Google has come forward with its plans for dealing with Internet filtering requirements in China, announcing that visitors to Google.cn will now be redirected to the Hong Kong version of the search engine, which will deliver uncensored results in “simplified Chinese.”
Google is now redirecting visitors to the Chinese search engine to Google.hk, so servers housed outside the country will provide an unfiltered version of the Web to mainland China in an arrangement that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is arguing adheres to the letter of Chinese Internet law, if not the spirit.
“Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said in a blog post. “We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement.”
Drummond called the automatic redirect of Google.cn a “sensible solution” to the company’s tense standoff with China, which began in January when it threatened to shutter its operations in the country if the government didn’t relax its filtering requirements. At the same time, Google went public with revelations about a coordinated wave of cyber attacks targeting dissident Chinese Gmail users and others.
