Google ends self-censorship, defies China govt

Google Inc defied China’s self- censorship rules by redirecting mainland Chinese users to an unfiltered Hong Kong Web site, threatening its ability to operate in the world’s largest Internet market.

The move escalated a two-month dispute as the government said Google broke its promise and was “totally wrong,” according to the official Xinhua news agency. Google, which had censored results on the Chinese site since its 2006 debut, said yesterday it plans to keep its research operations in the mainland.

The US government said it was “disappointed” Google and China failed to reach a compromise. The conflict has contributed to a deterioration in relations between the two countries, following disagreements over weapon sales to Taiwan and the valuation of the yuan.

“Google is playing a very dangerous game,” said Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst at business consultant Enderle Group in San Jose, California. “They could end up doing more damage than good.”

The size of Google’s China sales workforce will partially depend on the accessibility of the Hong Kong site, the company said in a statement yesterday. Google employs more than 600 workers in the country and it “can’t rule out the possibility of lay-offs,” company spokeswoman Jessica Powell said in phone interview today.

Searches from Beijing and Shanghai for outlawed terms related to the Falun Gong movement and 1989 Tiananmen Square military crackdown yielded error messages today, indicating the Hong Kong site is subject to the same restrictions as overseas Web portals including Google.com. The nation’s Web censorship system has been dubbed “The Great Firewall of China.”

China had an estimated 384 million Internet users at the end of 2009, more than the total US population. Baidu Inc held 58.6 per cent of China’s online search market last quarter, compared with 35.6 per cent for Google, according to Analysys International, a Beijing-based technology research company.

“It’s very likely that Google.com.hk will be blocked at least as aggressively as Google.com was and, more likely, probably more aggressively,” said Ben Schachter, an analyst at Broadpoint AmTech Inc. in San Francisco.

Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google, pushed the company’s executives to end censorship of Web-search results in China, a person familiar with the matter said in January. The two sides held discussions on January 29 and February 25, according to Xinhua.

These talks never produced any serious progress because China wasn’t willing to bend in its demand that search results be censored, the three people familiar with the matter said this week.