Google concedes defeat in China
censorship battle
Josh
Halliday
guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 January 2013 13.52 EST
Google has reluctantly
conceded defeat in its latest effort to combat online censorship in China , after a
year of behind-the-scenes brinkmanship over sensitive search terms banned by
authorities.
The search company has
quietly dropped a warning message shown to Chinese users when they search for
politically sensitive phrases, after Beijing
found new ways to cut them off from the web.
Google and Chinese
authorities have been involved in a tense game of cat-and-mouse over the issue
since May last year, when the feature was unveiled by the US company in
an attempt to improve search for Chinese citizens.
The standoff came to a
head in December, when Google finally decided to drop the feature because users
were still being disconnected by Chinese authorities.
A source in China said
Google decided it was "counterproductive" to continue the technical
dispute, despite several attempts to get around it.
News that Google had
dropped the warning message and an accompanying online help page emerged on
Friday, when the censorship monitoring website Great Fire published results of
tests it had carried out on search in China .
A Google spokesman
confirmed it removed the notification features in December, but declined to
comment further due to the sensitivity of the situation in China .
Google explained in May
last year, when it introduced the feature, that users in mainland China
experienced connection issues when searching for phrases including
"Yangtze River" and "Jiangsu Mobile", a phone service.
Within 24 hours of the
feature being launched it was disabled by Chinese authorities. Days later, in
June, Google modified how the notification would appear for users – but that
too resulted in another block.
In November, Google' s English-language and Chinese-language services
were blocked for 24 hours as tensions stepped up. Google resolved to drop the
notification features in early December after users continued to report
problems for certain searches.
Google has had a tense
relationship with China
since 2006, when it first launched its search function in the country. The
latest dispute comes amid a wider crackdown on internet use in China . This
includes fresh blockades on the use of "virtual private networks",
which help people access the web anonymously.
The ruling Communist
party, led by Xi Jinping, last month announced moves to force internet users to
fully identify themselves to service providers, raising fresh concerns about
freedom of speech in the country.
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