Right, despite my post yesterday about The Freezing Point… the big big China Watchers news lately seems to be about Google.cn’s launch. Following in the footsteps of MSN and Yahoo, Google has opened a .CN affiliate so all the Chinese can feel special about viewing targetted advertising, country specific searches, and more newsworthy, have their search results edited to reflect the values and opinions of the ruling power.
My friend Chris has a good post about it at his site Notes Of A Sinophibe. Basically, like MSN and Yahoo before it, Google has agreed to the Chinese governments stipulation that to open a .CN Web site they must edit the search results, removing all things that conflict, or contradict, with the official Party line.
This is making waves, but in the end… will anything change? Will we all stop using the three major search engines to protest this? Nope… we’ll let Corporate America dirty its hands with Communist China and gladly place out of mind the fact that there is a whole generation of Chinese netizens that are not allowed to access the Web sites of their choice, but even worse, they have no idea that those sites exist.
Reference: No Booze Or Jokes For Googlers In China @ CNET News.com
Oh, and check this out… it’s hilarious!!
Mark Fiore’s iRepress Cartoon
