It appears China have lifted a recent ban on Google, but will Google stay in China?
China has lifted its online blockade of Google.com after a two-week crackdown that had prevented direct access to the site and temporarily thwarted popular workarounds, a media watchdog group reported Friday.
The Paris-based journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, said that tests revealed the uncensored version of the search site was accessible again to internet users in Beijing and Shanghai. The crackdown overlapped with the June 4 anniversary of the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
A Google spokesperson confirmed this, saying that “we have heard no further reports from users in China of problems accessing Google.com.”
Apparently Brin has said they are definately staying in China, despite other comments made this week:
Google Inc. is committed to doing business in China despite criticism the company has faced for abiding by Chinese government censorship restrictions, co-founder Sergey Brin said this week.
On Tuesday, after a session with several U.S. senators to discuss telecommunications legislation, Brin made comments that prompted some journalists to speculate Google intended to change or eliminate its operations in China.
In fact, he reiterated Google’s intention to move ahead with its google.cn site — a version of the leading Internet search engine that censors thousands of sites according to Chinese standards — as well as its global google.com site.
Brin told a small group of invited journalists: “I think it’s perfectly reasonable to do something different. Say, OK, let’s stand by the principle against censorship and we won’t actually operate there”.
But he then added: “That’s an alternative path. It’s not the one we’ve chosen to take right now”.
Why was Google down in the first place? I think it was simply to teach them a lesson. To bring them to heel. But, sites go down in China all the time so there is a slight chance it was random. Then again, it may have been just to tweak Brin for his comments. The “great” thing about China is that we will never know and we will never know when it (or some other site) will go down next.
It seems coincidental that google.cn went down around the same time Brin made those comments. Indeed we will never know..
I’m currently living in China, and had a rough time of things while google.com was “down”. The interesting thing for me was that the site wasn’t totally blocked, but sporadic. I could check my gmail one minute, but not the next. I could get to google.com fine in the morning, but it would be broken in the afternoon. I had the impression that they weren’t completely blocking the site, but maybe limiting it’s traffic.