I am sure this is nothing new, but I had not seen it before. I was looking for the name of a bittorrent search engine so I did a quick Google search. To my surprise the message “In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.” popped up. Huh, censorship on Google in the US?
If Google has such a big problem with censorship that it decides to “leave” China because of this, why is it okay to allow it in the US? Double standards, Google, double standards.
You may notice that the removal is caused by “a compalint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act”. It is an ACT, not something else has very ambiguous range. Do you actually know the law that let Google censor its search results in China? Or, why I can’t search a simple word “???” in China? Is that ilegal? A lot of Google services has been blocked in China and others are not stable because of GFW, but not a law or act or something clear, I think that is why Google leave this “where amazing happens” country..
Don, Google knew exactly which search terms are banned and which not. That’s not very ambiguous, Google and other media companies even have lists of these words. With regards to ???, don’t pretend or believe that you can’t search for it from within China: try it for example on Baidu or on Bing and you will get the result you want. And yes, I am aware that the characters of some politicians are currently blocked when you try to search them on Google, but that’s just part of the cat-and-mouse game between Google and the government. Try the search term on other non-Chinese search engines and you’ll see it works fine.
For many people China is difficult to understand, but there are laws and rules here just like in the US. If Google principally refuses to censor their search results (which is fine with me), they should do that everywhere, not only in China. A principle is a principle, you can’t have double standards.
@Don,no, it’s not the cat-and-mouse game,it’s the government’s solo show.
the reason why Baidu can search ‘???’ but Google can’t, I guess it is because Baidu censor the results one by one, and let the illegal content hide, of course u can see the insensitive results.But Google do nothing, and to sensor results one by one and shield the illegal links outside of Google corp. is a huge job. So government just simply shield them all. Typical willing to kill thousand, won’t let one escape.
they r the master of RPC, they just don’t fear people noticed so apparent activities of censorship. Because they said it’s legal.
@Jim: Don’t think you’re right, because like I said in my comment above, on other non-Chinese search engines the ??? search works fine (try Yahoo, Altavista or DuckDuckGo for example).
@marcvanderchijs:
Thank you for the quick reply.
Well, the censorship Google faced is not a simple thing. People can search anything without any “connection reset” problem by using Baidu because it is “inside” the GFW, not outside. But Google, when it decided to leave China and move its servers to HK, people from Mainland China have to visit it through the GFW. That’s why Google becomes very unstable since it leaves China. When
Excuse me, where’s my comment? Maybe some kind of censorship?
Which comment? Only received one comment from you (the top one in this thread). No censorship here.
Hey buddy,
Are you in China? Seriously, talk to anyone in IT industry in China about your opinion before posting non-sense posts and comments.
@yy Just look at my profile and you’ll see I’ve been working in China’s IT industry for many years. No need to agree with my opinion of course, but I think I know pretty well what’s going on here.
@Don Just went through my 100s of spam comments from the past days and found one from you that is obviously not spam. That must be the one you were referring to in your comment from April 6. Not sure why it ended up in my WordPress spam box (Maybe because of fake email address? First one you used was also fake but this shorter one may have triggered WordPress algorithm), but I just found and posted it. Should it happen again let me know and I will check my spam box.
Google is telling you they have complied with legal action. Google is being transparent in telling you that the result you want exists, but Google can’t show it to you. Baidu just hides stuff and censors stuff without telling searchers. Baidu is anything but transparent.