Google has rude awakening in China
China’s authoritarian government, caught up in a trial of strength with internet users over censorship, has opened a witch hunt on Google China
On Thursday, it accused the search engine of “severely endangering China’s youth” by linking to pornographic content – a search for the word “son” in Chinese would curiously turn up some results referring to incestuous sexual relationships.
Observers said the crackdown was likely to be a mixture of the government’s recent hard-line approach on censorship and increasingly bitter rivalry with Baidu, Google’s domestic Chinese rival, which holds 59 per cent market share. Although authorities accused Google of allowing links to lurid content, similar material could be found on Baidu.
Beijing has ordered Google to stop users of its Chinese-language service accessing overseas websites in the biggest blow to the world’s leading search engine in China since it started operating there four years ago.
The action comes amid a storm of outrage among Chinese internet users over Beijing’s order that every new PC sold in the country be equipped with censorship software, ostensibly to block pornography. One senior US internet figure said the move against Google appeared to be an attempt to deflect attention away from the domestic censorship uproar by redirecting concerns about pornography against a foreign company.
Before Google obtained a local internet licence in 2005, China’s internet censors frequently blocked its global website. After Google decided to tackle what could one day become the world’s largest internet market from within, it has had to adjust to China’s rules. As all other internet portals, news websites and search engines in China, it is required to censor the content on its site.
If a user searches on Google.cn for Falun Gong, the sect Beijing views as an evil cult, the website will display an additional sentence on the page saying: “According to local laws, regulations and policies, some search results could not be displayed.”
The company was “not in the game for making money” in the short-term, he said. Now such a goal could become even more remote. Google China took its first serious blow this year when Beijing blocked YouTube in March over videos related to dissent in Tibet, one of its main political taboos, causing the site to lose scores of Chinese web users to local competitors such as youku.