Finally!

[crs]

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. Leave a comment

Comments

[intuition_ist]

cool!

[flexagon]

I guess the larger implications are good, yes, but I feel really bad for my teammates in China... :-/

[nakor]

About time! But good to see it being done now.

I do hope Google and China haven't just started a war.

[jered]

That's really awesome.... Google definitely needed to do something like this to make up for a lot of the recent fail on "Don't be evil". It'll be interesting to see how it works out.

[crs]

"A lot of the recent fail"?

[jered]

The biggest problems have been around privacy concerns, which have led some of the more paranoid people I know to avoid using Google apps and devices. When Eric Schmidt, the CEO, says "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place," but then blackballs a news organization that publishes his Google-searchable personal information, that smacks of both a fundamental misunderstanding of the value of privacy, and of dangerous elitism and hypocrisy.

[jered]

Here's the EFF's commentary on the situation; it looks like there's been no official response repudiating Schmidt's comments or actions.