In a blog post from Google, released yesterday, the company explains that they have implemented the new plan regarding how they will deal with China. In January of 2010, they made the announcement that they had to develop ‘a new approach to China’.  This new approach was necessitated when Google detected highly sophisticated attacks on their networks.  After some research, they determined it was indeed originating from China, and were generally, but not exclusively, targeting the GMail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Basically, the new plan is to reroute requests for google.cn to google.hk.  The Hong Kong version of Google has simple Chinese implemented and, most importantly, is uncensored.  If you’ve followed any of the news surrounding Google’s relationship with the Chinese government, you know it has focused almost solely on censorship.  Google wants the Chinese traffic and business, but the not-so-democratic Chinese government isn’t cool with an open internet.

I, personally, applaud the efforts of Google in working with China.  While I realize it isn’t entirely altruistic (ad revenue, etc.), I can only imagine how hard it must be to censor what is already a highly complex database. Furthermore, they’ve taken a ton of flack for bending to the demands of the Chinese government.  But really, I think it’s better that the Chinese people have censored access to Google than no access at all.

As a side note, Google has created a page to allow everyone to see what services are currently allowed in China. Check it out here.

What are your thoughts?  Please let me know in the comments!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Other Things. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.