Ars Technica

China and Google playing game of Chicken over censorship

jacqui@arstechnica.com (Jacqui Cheng) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:40:00 -0600

Chinese authorities are pounding their desks over compliance with the law as Google's C-Day approaches. The "C" is for Censorship, of course, which Google plans to lift in China sometime in the near future. The company has been in talks with China ever since the highly publicized hack earlier this year, and although the two may not be in agreement over what to censor, it seems likely that Google will keep at least some of its business in China.

"Google has made its case, both publicly and privately," China's Minister of Industry and Information Technology Li Yizhong told the press on Friday when questioned about censorship, according to Reuters. "If you don't respect Chinese laws, you are unfriendly and irresponsible, and the consequences will be on you."

Translation: in this game of chicken, the Chinese government won't be the one to budge. Meanwhile, a person "familiar with the talks" told the Wall Street Journal that the company isn't likely to pull out of China altogether if this censorship experiment goes sour. Google is apparently putting together a "patchwork agreement" with a number of different Chinese agencies so that it can continue operating to some degree in China.

One thing's for sure: the status quo won't hold. The WSJ's source claims a decision will come within weeks, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt indicated at a press conference in Abu Dhabi that "something will happen soon."

If Google opens the floodgates on previously censored topics like the Dalai Lama or the Tiananmen Square protests, there's little stopping China from taking measures to block the site like it already does with numerous others. There are plenty of workarounds for crafty Internet users, but we wouldn't be surprised to see this happen if China and Google are unable to come to an agreement.

Ars Technica

China and Google playing game of Chicken over censorship

Science journo quits writing to fight chiropractic libel suit

Bed readers rejoice: iPad gains last-minute rotation lock

Firefox 3.6 sees 100M downloads, now pushing notifications

Five insights into the behaviors of social media users

New WMAP data can't erase "dark flow"

Comcast-NBCU merger: how the regulators will decide

Hands on with Bit.Trip Runner: don't watch, listen

Beautiful innovation: the first 20 hours of FF XIII

Family of four gets their genomes sequenced

SOCOM 4, played with PlayStation Move: our thoughts

Or will I go from rags to riches? Hands-on with Mafia 2

OpenGL 4 spec arrives with Direct3D 11 feature parity

iPhone still second-place US smartphone while Android grows

Intel's NAS-specific Atom platform hastens PCification

iPhone OS 4.0 may finally bring multitasking nirvana

Transformers: War for Cybertron shows how it all began

Canonical's design team responds to theme criticisms

Green Day: Rock Band coming June 8, supports full exports

Court nixes individual track downloads of Pink Floyd albums

feature: Safely whitelist your favorite sites and opt out of tracking (updated rules)

0-day exploits for IE flaw another reason to switch to IE8

FCC Commissioner rips ISPs on broadband prices, competition

Limbo is quiet, subtle genius... coming to XBLA

Congress wants big NatSec exemptions for spectrum inventory