Google Bends To Chinese Demand To Block Porn Links
Google said in a statement that it met with Chinese government representatives to discuss problems with the company's Chinese search engine service, which China condemned for linking to pornography sites and other "lewd" content that violated national laws, The Wall Street Journal reported.
An official at Google China later apologized to the public and promised to remediate the situation by removing links leading to pornography sites from its Chinese search engine queries, according to the official Chinese Xinhua News Agency.
The apology comes a day after China reprimanded Google for allowing Chinese users to access pornography when conducting Google searches. For the third time this year China has reprimanded the Mountain View-based Google, saying Google had allowed Chinese citizens to access pornography and other "lewd" content.
However, the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center (CIIRC), a government-backed "watchdog" organization, said in a statement that Google China was still providing links to what the government considered obscene images, videos and articles, despite its previous warnings.
The CIIRC said yesterday that "Google China has not conducted the oversight required according to China's laws and regulations, and a large volume of foreign Internet pornographic information has entered our borders though this web site," Reuters reported.
Google caved to Chinese reprimands by pledging to self-censor its content in accordance with China law. "We are undertaking a thorough review of our service and taking all necessary steps to fix any problems with our results. This has been a substantial engineering effort, and we believe we have addressed the large majority of the problem results," The Wall Street Journal reported.
In addition, China is apparently taking matters into its own hands to address the problem.
The Chinese government has already started block thousands of Web sites linked to pornography via Google, according to Xinhua. The blocks affect Chinese-language results from any country, while keeping English language results.
Meanwhile, China has also disabled Google's drop-down function in its search field, in which Google tries to guess user search queries based on the first few letters of the subject, according to The New York Times.
The Chinese National Office for Internet Pornography said it also asked Google China to follow the country's laws regulating pornography and other controversial content and take immediate action to remove all pornographic and other "lewd" content and prevent such content from flowing across China's cyber borders.
This is not the first time that China has admonished Google for pornography or tried to restrict its content. China launched a major crackdown on Internet porn in both January and April, targeting popular Web sites and search engines such as Google and China's domestic search engine Baidu.
The concerted effort to block pornography sites on Google is China's latest attempt to control Internet content. China recently caused concern for U.S. computer makers when it announced a mandate requiring that computers sold in China come pre-installed with Chinese Web filtering software Green Dam Youth Escort.