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Article

26 Jan 2006

Author:
Rebecca MacKinnon, fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, on her weblog, RConversation

Testing the "Castrated" Google [China]

I went on Google.cn and did a search with the Chinese characters for "Dong Zhou" village - where police recently shot unarmed villagers... The search turned up a number of results talking about the incident as a "blood crime" or "massacre"... A search in Chinese on google.com, not surprisingly turned up a lot more results critical of the shooting... Similar results for Dong Zhou on Yahoo and the popular Chinese search engine Baidu showed only benign tourist and commercial information... If Google wants to show that it is truly serious about doing the right thing in China it should: 1. Make its "block list" public, and disclose the laws, regulations, and procedures that have required these specific words and URL's to be blocked... 2. Fight to prevent Google.com from being blocked... 3. If the Chinese government makes unreasonable requests for search result data, do the same thing you did to the U.S. Department of Justice: just say no... 4. Establish clear procedures for your local China-based staff...