Digital Home Canada

Reporters Without Borders (RWB), a non-governmental organization that speaks out on issues regarding freedom of the press, today accused the Internet's biggest search-engine, Google, of "hypocrisy" for its plan to launch a censured version of its product in China.

 The California-based Google has announced that it will soon launch a China-based Google.cn will should improve and speed up its service for websurfers located in China.  

The company has said that Google.cn would be censored in line with Chinese law, however, the company says it has no choice but to obey Chinese laws when doing business in China similar to how they must obey French laws when operating in France or German laws when operating in Germany. Google's largest competitor, Yahoo! has been working with Chinese censors for more than three years for its Chinese search engine.

Google officials told the Associate Press that the censorship concessions in China was an excruciating decision for a company that adopted “don't be evil” as a motto, however the company  believes it's a worthwhile sacrifice.

"The launch of Google.cn is a black day for freedom of expression in China," the organization said in a press release issued today. "The firm defends the rights of US Internet users before the US government but fails to defend its Chinese users against theirs." The comment comes after Google refused to provide the U.S. Government about web searches carried out on the companies U.S. search engine saying that it was an infringement of Americans privacy.

RWB says that Google’s statements about respecting online privacy in the U.S. are hypocritical in light of the company abiding by Chinese censorship laws and dismisses Googles defense as a "tired argument" and that "Freedom of expression isn't a minor principle that can be pushed aside when dealing with a dictatorship."

When the Chinese search engine (Google.cn) is launched inside China, the site will not serve up search results that include sites not approved by the Chinese government. This means that sites discussing such events as the Tiananmen square massacure or human rights in China will simply not show up in the Google results.

Outside of China, a Chinese version of Google exists at www.google.com/intl/zh-CN and it is not censored. Since all internet traffic flowing in and out of China goes through government computers, Chinese citizens are simply blocked from accessing the uncensored version of Google.

Discuss and Learn More

Discuss this story in the News forum in the Digital Forums. Membership is free and with over 75 forums and 15,000 members, there is always something new and interesting to discuss.