Google Defends Censorship of Web Sites

Jan. 25, 2006 — -- Saying that providing some information is better than providing no information, Google Inc. today defended its decision to cooperate with China's demand to censor some Web search results.

The company agreed to block some sites that cover human rights, Tibet and other topics Beijing doesn't want the citizens of this communist nation to research.

Google.cn will "provide meaningful benefits to Chinese Internet users," said Google senior policy counsel Andrew McLaughlin, referring to the company's new China site.

In the past, Google's global search engine site, Google.com, had often been off-limits inside China. Technology experts suspected that the Chinese government blocked it.

"While removing search results inconsistent with Google's mission," McLaughlin said in a statement, "providing no information -- or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information -- is more inconsistent with our mission."

China currently has an estimated 100 million Web users. That number is projected to rise to 187 million over the next two years.

The controversy over Google's decision underscores the ongoing tensions between Internet tools that increase computer users' access to information and the efforts of totalitarian and repressive regimes around the world to limit that access. Yahoo! and Microsoft also cooperate with China's censorship policy, as do some manufacturers of Internet servers, to gain access to a market of 1.3 billion people and a booming economy that is the world's fourth largest.

Last year, Yahoo! turned over to the Chinese government information about a Chinese journalist's e-mail account. The journalist was later convicted of violating state secrecy laws.

Google is currently resisting a U.S. Justice Department subpoena that seeks data from search results related to child pornography.

China has long been wary of the Internet's power to give average citizens information. Nearly 20,000 Web sites available in the United States became unavailable in China, according to a 2002 study by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. They included news sites like the BBC and The Washington Post, sites based in Taiwan and Tibet, and sites that published information about health conditions in China.