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Yesterday Google announced that they’d be removing any form of censorship from searches in China.  Since Google has been in the China they’ve always bowed to the will of the Chinese government and filtered search results.  Censor no more.  Chinese Googlers will now be redirected from Google.cn to Google.hk

After an attack on January 12 of this year on Google and others, Google got furious because the attacks seemed like they were executed by the Chinese government.  Google then started to flame the Chinese government’s interpretations of free speech, or lack thereof.  It’s common knowledge that China blocks sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others.

Amazingly Google acknowledge in a blog post that opening up the Red Filter was so popular among the Chinese that it may affect the performance of Google for other users.

Here’s what Google said about their rationale:

Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced—it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China.

Way to go Google and way to go Chinese Googlers

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