Google is such a strange company. Don't they participate in the suppression of free expression in places like China, justifying it as a cost of doing business?
edit: in an effort to not spread bad information, I'd like to retract my statement. It was based on outdated information.
This reality of the censorship appears to be well documented[1], and I don't think it's quite as simple as that. Here's the TL;DR
Google filtered terms the Chinese government required (by law), but did so by returning results saying that some items were filtered out specifically so users would know their results were filtered. Google never gave any information on who searched specific terms, but after some attacks on their servers in an apparent attempt to get this information, Google announced they would no longer filter searches for China. Talks on how to accomplish this broke down, and Google redirected their China site to Hong Kong, which has no censorship restrictions, but the Great Firewall seems to be filtering results.
They stopped the redirect[1] and now just show a link to Google Hong Kong.
They also removed the warning that the user's search results were being filtered [2].
To the best of my knowledge, the current status:
User visits Google China - http://google.cn
- This is a hyperlink to Google Hong Kong on the front page
- IF user searches via Google.cn, the search results will be filtered by China not self-censored by Google. They will NOT be presented with a warning anymore.
- IF user searches via Google.hk, from mainland china, the same thing will happen and the results will still be filtered. [3]
At this point, I don't believe the link to .hk Google serves as much use as it does a political statement.
I agree, I think their original stance, showing results and noting where they had to filter, was much better. But if that makes them a target, and can reverse and good they think they are doing if they are hacked by China and any identifying information (correlation with the Great Firewall seems likely) is found, I can see their reasoning. If you truly want to do the right thing, is making yourself a target that makes the situation worse the right way to go about it? It's a complex situation, and there's probably lots of information that we aren't privy to. At least it got press and there was some awareness.
So Google has tried almost everything and has broken into China's Great Firewall. They even were warning users if the content was politically controversial.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China
edit: in an effort to not spread bad information, I'd like to retract my statement. It was based on outdated information.