Google ends censorship of its Chinese search services
Ten weeks after raising the alarm over the hacking of Chinese users’ email accounts, Google has ended censorship of its local Chinese search engine as threatened. Traffic will now be redirected to its uncensored Hong Kong arm, Google.com.hk. “Earlier today we stopped censoring our search services — Google Search, Google News, and Google Images — on Google.cn,” David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer wrote on Google’s official blog Monday. The blog post states that the company plans to continue sales efforts and R&D work in China. FT writes that although Google may try to depict the struggle over the last two months as a success, on the grounds that its vaunted principles were belatedly upheld (four years after it first agreed to bow to Chinese censors), such a claim is undermined by the potential loss of access to one of the world’s largest markets. The stock prices of Baidu and Tencent have already implied the expected absorption among competitors of the income surrendered by Google.