Version of Google in China Won't Offer E-Mail or Blogs
"Google is bringing a special version of its powerful search engine to China, leaving behind two of its most popular features in the United States.
In an effort to cope with China's increasingly pervasive Internet controls, Google said Tuesday that it would introduce a search engine here this week that excludes e-mail messaging and the ability to create blogs.
Google officials said the new search engine, Google.cn, was created partly as a way to avoid potential legal conflicts with the Chinese government, which has become much more sophisticated at policing and monitoring material appearing on the Internet.
Web sites have exploded in popularity in a country eager for freer flow of information. But Web portals and search engines trying to win Chinese users face a significant balancing act: they do not want to flout government rules and guidelines that restrict the spread of sensitive content, but they want to attract users with interesting content.
One result has been that search engines and Web portals have censored their sites and cooperated with Chinese authorities. Indeed, the move to create a new site comes after Google itself, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft, have come under scrutiny over the last few years for cooperating with the Chinese government to censor or block online content.
Currently, people in China use Google by accessing its global engine, Google.com. But industry experts say that the site is often not accessible from inside China, possibly because it is blocked by Chinese authorities culling what is deemed to be sensitive or illegal information.
Google's new Chinese platform, which will not allow users to create personal links with Google e-mail or blog sites, will comply with Chinese law and censor information deemed inappropriate or illegal by the Chinese authorities. This approach might help the company navigate the legal thickets that competitors have encountered in China.
Foreign companies say they must abide by Chinese laws and pass personal information about users on to the Chinese government. In one case two years ago, Yahoo provided information that helped the government convict a Chinese journalist, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison, on charges of leaking state secrets to a foreign Web site.
Another challenge, though, is trying to attract Chinese users to a censored engine. Google officials conceded that the company was struggling to balance the need to bolster its presence in the China market with the increasingly stringent regulations that govern Internet use here.
''Google is mindful that governments around the world impose restriction on access to information,'' a senior executive wrote, responding to questions. ''In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on Google.cn, in response to local law, regulation or policy. While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission.''
The Chinese government has been particularly strict in recent years about filtering antigovernment news and opinion pieces from the Web and blocking Web sites or blogs that question governmental authority.
The government also has employed a variety of techniques to control what appears on the Web -- temporarily blocking sites, redirecting viewers to government-controlled sites and even shutting sites altogether. Government officials have even been able to block references to specific words, like Tibet, Falun Gong and Tiananmen Square.
A year ago, when Google first started a Chinese-language version of its global service, the company filtered out and omitted some news sources that were already being blocked in China. The company said at the time: ''There is nothing Google can do about it.''
Now, Google officials say they hope they have struck the right compromise. The new site will improve access and speed up regular search engine service in a country where Internet traffic is skyrocketing, even if that service is limited in scope, the company said.
China has more than 100 million Internet users, making it second only to the United States in Web surfers; and blogging, podcasting, playing online games and surfing the Web are wildly popular.
Google says it plans to disclose when information has been blocked or censored from its new site, just as it does in the United States, Germany and other countries.
The regular Google.com site, based outside China, will continue to be available for access from China.
Difficulties using the site have put Google at a disadvantage in China, where the Google.com site had lost ground to a Chinese rival, Baidu.com, which went public last year.
Baidu is called the Chinese Google, and Google even has a stake in the company. But officials at Google say that recently they have been losing share in China, partly because of difficulty people had using Google.com.
The Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders, which tracks the activities of Western technology companies seeking to do business with repressive regimes, condemned the Google-China deal as ''hypocrisy'' and called it ''a black day for freedom of expression in China'' in a statement published on its Web site.
''The firm defends the rights of U.S. Internet users'' the statement added, ""but fails to defend its Chinese users against theirs."""