The IT Nerd

Imagine you’re Google for a second. You’ve tried to filter search results to keep the Chinese government happy and you’ve tried to behave yourself while taking heat for doing so. But when you discover that the Gmail accounts belonging to human rights activists have been hacked, what do you do? You apparently reconsider your operations in China:

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

So where do things go from here? Google is going to talk to the Chinese government and figure out a way to operate an unfiltered search engine in a legal way. If that doesn’t get sorted out, Google is going to close Google.cn and maybe leave the country. Bravo Google! The only question I have is this: What took you so long to grow a pair?

This entry was posted on January 12, 2010 at 11:33 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags China, Google. 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.