Google Closes China Site In Censorship Dispute

Google Inc. closed its China website, a scant two months after threatening to do so over a censorship dispute with the Chinese government officials, and redirected users to an uncensored search engine in Hong Kong.

The search giant said that it decided to "no longer continue censoring our results" at its google.cn site.

"Earlier today we stopped censoring our search services--Google Search, Google News and Google Images on Google.cn," said David Drummond, Google chief legal officer and senior vice president, corporate development, in a blog post on the company's web site.

Within hours of Google's decision, a Chinese government official issued a statement that the search giant has "violated its promise" and is "totally wrong" to stop censoring its Chinese language search results and for blaming China for alleged hacker attacks.

Chinese government officials subsequently moved to restrict user access to Google's mainland China site, disabling certain searches for unacceptable material and blocking links. Read more…