Google China: Could end US/China Relations

Things appear to be heating up surrounding the whole [blippr]Google[/blippr] China controversy. China has now condemned the USA’s criticism over its internet controls, calling them ‘groundless’ and stating it could harm the relations between the two countries.

US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton called on Thursday for China to lift its internet restrictions and heavy laws against the spreading of content on the internet. She’s also urged Beijing to investigate Google’s complaints, that the hacking of GMail accounts had originated in China.

Ma Zhaoxu, Foreign Ministry spokesman, said the US government should “respect the facts” and stop “making groundless accusations against China”, ironically.

In fact, funnily enough, he went on to say “the US has criticised China’s policies to administer the internet, and “this runs contrary to the facts and is harmful to China-US relations.” If China don’t restrict freedom on the internet, why do they arrest bloggers? Just a thought.

Arguments such as these, caused over things even as simple as Google, could create a disastrous relationship between US and China.

Google China has been around since 2006 – at which point the internet giant agreed to censor searches for banned topics in China, for example the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, or Falun Gong.

Recently, Google got sick of all this censoring – and apparently, because of several attacks against their service, want to offer a completely uncensored search engine to the Chinese public.

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Google China may disappear completely.

In a decision that should have been made a long time ago, [blippr]Google[/blippr] have gotten sick of China’s censorship and ‘repetitive attacks on Gmail users.’ Google now refuse to censor their search results to China, and face a wave of criticism and anger from the Chinese government, following their harsh restrictions on the search engine.

In a way, this is Google, a company recently titled for world domination, or atleast Market Takeover in the tech world, living up to their popularly ridiculed mantra ‘Don’t be evil.’ which they’ve used for quite some time. The actual response from Google is caused by repetitive attacks from China on the [blippr]Gmail[/blippr] accounts of Human Rights Activists for China based in the US, Europe and China itself.

From Google’s Blog Post:

We have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

But a decision such as this that will likely cause great discontent, and perhaps the forced removal of Google’s prescence in China, highlights the growing problem of lack of freedom, and could be a major boost to Chinese-prescent competitors, such as [blippr]Baidu[/blippr], or even [blippr]Bing[/blippr].

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Opera was once a web browser heavily used by Chinese users – that is, the international version of the browser, due to a small error that allowed Chinese users to access Facebook and Twitter, essentially breaking the Chinese Firewall. Now it’d appear that China has forced Opera to make sure all the users can no longer do this – by forcing them to switch back to the Chinese version.

It’s a sad thing to think that the new superpower in the world is one in which demotes freedom of speech and sharing. It’s one that doesn’t want news, especially negative news about the politics in the country, and opinions of the country to be shared about. English businessmen inside China have found that they can’t post to Twitter at all – thanks to a lovely ban by China of any news sharing site, whether it be Facebook, Twitter or MySpace.

Personally, any kind of ban like this is ignorant. But China can’t see it that way. “The difference between the Chinese and the international version is that the former connects to compression servers within China…..benefits are higher speed, lower costs and an overall improved mobile web browsing experience,” Opera released in a statement, but they were not prepared to discuss the “background for this decision”.

China was incredibly likely to have direct involvement, as many people already speculate.

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Search Engine Bing is in hot water with New York Times’ Nick Kristoff, over censorship of content while browsing in Chinese.

Bing, basically has an issue, which they dcalre as a bug, that some content, especially that of the banned practices or ‘cults’ in China. The big issue is that it’s acceptable for search engines to block certain content to users of a country if the country says so, like Google does for many websites for Chinese users – but Bing isn’t just blocking content for people in China. They’re blocking content that China deem unacceptable to any Chinese users worldwide. So if you browse from New York in Chinese, it’ll still block the content that China doesn’t want.

Controversially, Nick Kristoff is asking his users to boycott Bing until they fix this issue.

A statement from Bing assures user it’s a ‘glitch’ and will be fixed.

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• iPhone Finally Arrives In China – No WiFi

The iPhone has arrived in China – but the Chinese aren’t happy about the lack of an incredibly important feature – the ability to use Wi-Fi, caused by China’s recent ban of Wi-Fi, which is now lifted. Really, the iPhone is losing out a huge market share because of the lack of a Wi-Fi functionality. I can see where the anger is coming from – once again, a device that lacks a feature that is standard with the iPhone, lacking from a country – like iPhone tethering missing from the US, thanks to AT&T.

Click to Read More.

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