China's censors roll out blockades
by Jessica Mintz Associated Press Mar. 28, 2010 12:00 AM
SEATTLE - Now that Google is sending Web surfers in mainland China to a Hong Kong-based site, the company is free to display complete search results on any topic without the self-censorship Beijing had required.
But that doesn't mean people in China are getting more information.
The Chinese government's own Web-filtering tools are blocking people from seeing the results of sensitive searches made on the Hong Kong site, Google.com.hk. And if it wants to, Beijing could keep people on the mainland from even connecting to the Hong Kong site.
Some questions and answers about the situation:
Question: What was Google.cn? Why would someone in China use that instead of Google.com?
Answer: Google operates a Chinese-language search site that people from all over the world can access.
But starting in 2002, Google learned that when Web users in China typed in words deemed sensitive by Beijing, such as "the '89 student movement," referring to the Tiananmen Square massacre, the requests for information didn't always reach Google's servers because of blocking by the Chinese government. The users' Web browsers would stop working or show an error message. Sometimes Google.com was slow or completely unavailable to mainland Chinese users. Or people were even redirected to a competing search site.
The company launched Google.cn, using the Internet domain for China, in 2006 so people in China would have a faster and more reliable site.
To be allowed to offer the service, Google had to agree to abide by Beijing's mandate that information deemed subversive or pornographic be omitted. But Google could tell people when it was excluding results.
Q: Can China take away Google.cn and stop visitors from being sent anywhere else?
A: Yes. The China Internet Network Information Center
, which answers to China's Ministry of Information Industry, controls the master "directory" of ".cn" Web sites. It could erase "google.cn" from its domain-name registry, which means people hunting for the search engine would be told "site not found."
The government also could change what happens when someone types "google.cn" into a Web browser.
