A recent Reuters article reports that thorny legal issues have created high stakes in the recent announcement by Google that it may pull out of China.
Google, for its part, has been fairly quiet about the affair since their announcement a few weeks ago. China, on the other hand, has been quite vocal about its intention to hold firm to its censorship policies (which Google had said must be lifted in order for it to remain in the country).
Early reports suggested that Google lifted the filters on its Chinese version of its search engine, though the company has denied having made any changes. If the filters were lifted, analysts are warning that Google employees in China could face prosecution for breaking the law.
Last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that though the company was still censoring its results in China, it would be looking to change this situation in a short time.
In addition, political momentum is building around the issue, with Hillary Clinton and the US Senate all having called for more freedom of expression on the internet.
Some headway has already been made: China has backed away from a controversial plan it had that would have required computer-makers to install special filters on their computers.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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Tags: Google China
Google ! Move your Asian HQ to Taipei. On google.cn website – unfilter one sensitive topic per day for 5000 days. Include at the top of each search result – the official Chinese government stance on the topic (in this way the ‘paid’ advertising structure could remain unchanged). Choose your daily unfilterings tactfully. This is the way to go.
“Some headway has already been made: China has backed away from a controversial plan it had that would have required computer-makers to install special filters on their computers.”
Your reporting is misleading. The Chinese plan for requiring special filters was a completely separate issue. Why? Because the plan was announced and then retracted some SIX months ago, long BEFORE this Google thing happened. These two things are not related, so please stop making this sound like we got one concession out of the Chinese.
there is no way google can win out in this one. the best it can do is to screw all of its counterparts over by forcing the congress to pass some kind of law obliging corporations in China to assert their human rights positions. would be a pretty stupid thing to do and it will get google a LOT of enemies.