The Google in China discussion continues. In addition to Chinese newspapers questioning whether all of the necessary paperwork is in place for it to operate google.cn, they are also questioning Google's policy of telling users which pages are censored.
And Google was also in the news yesterday over its rejection of a demand by the US government for access to a week's worth of search logs, requested to show that voluntary regulation does not work in protecting kids from unsavoury content. In response to the government's assertion that access to a list of search words would help understand user behaviour, Google states that "This statement is so uninformed as to be nonsensical". I have to agree.
Back to China. It's certainly an interesting debate. In some respects the Chinese authorities are adopting a similar policy to that taken by businesses in their application of Websense and the like, although you would hope that the criteria for a site being blocked by Websense are somewhat different from those imposed on google.cn.
This site is blocked by my friend's employers. Websense cites two main reasons for blocking: security (including spyware, phishing, attack prevention etc.) and web filtering (including employee productivity, bandwidth management and legal liability). As far as I'm aware, the site doesn't fall foul of any of the security issues. So it must have been deemed legally questionable, have been hammering the networks or have reduced my mate's productivity significantly, or maybe that of his colleagues. I somehow doubt that any of these are true either.
At the end of the day, both g.cn and Websense can be classified as employing censorship, albeit being driven by different end goals. While there's a way around the latter (change jobs, surf from home), is the freedom of companies to censor what they choose any different from China's censorship?
