Official Google Blog: Google in China

Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s senior policy counsel:

Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population, however, does so far more severely. Whether our critics agree with our decision or not, due to the severe quality problems faced by users trying to access Google.com from within China, this is precisely the choice we believe we faced.

This is the sort of straight-forward explanation I was hoping to see. But McLaughlin is dissembling with regard to his explanation why the regular google.com domain doesn’t work well in China — he makes it sound like a technical problem, but the real reason is that the Chinese authorities block it.

★ Monday, 30 January 2006