Latest statement on Google China
23 March 2010
David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer
Beijingers go to Google`s office to give flowers
On january 12th, we announced on this blog that Google and more than 20 other u.s. companies have been subjected to complex cyberattacks from china, and the course of our in-depth investigation of these attacks, we have gathered evidence that dozens of Gmail accounts of chinese-related human rights are regularly hacked by third parties, most of them through phishing or malware installed on their computers. These attacks and the problems of web censorship they exposed, combined with China`s further restrictions on the Internet since last year freedom of speech, including the continued blocking of websites such as FaceBook、Twitter、video website 、Google Docs and Blogger, led us to conclude that we can not continue to conduct self-censorship on Google.cn search results.
since this morning, we have stopped self-censorship on Google.cn search services, including Google Search (web search), Google News( information search) and Google Images (image search). users accessing the Google.cn will be directed to the Google.com.hk from now on. on this domain, we will provide uncensored simplified chinese search results. these services designed for chinese mainland users will be implemented through our servers in hong kong. Hong Kong users will also continue to access the same, uncensored traditional Chinese search services through Google.com.hk. In our migration process, due to the increase of server load in Hong Kong and the complexity of these changes, users may find that the search speed becomes slower or that some products are temporarily inaccessible.
Implementing our commitment to stop reviewing search results in Google.cn is a very difficult process. we hope that as many users as possible worldwide will have access to our services, including users mainland in china. The Chinese government has made it very clear in the course of our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable law requirement. To this end, we believe that a feasible solution to the challenges we face is to provide unreviewed simplified Chinese search results on the Google.com.hk —— which fully meets the law requirements, and also helps to improve access to information for Chinese mainland users. We very much hope that China government respect our decision, although we know that users` access to Google services may be blocked at any time. For this purpose, we will closely monitor the issue of web site access and have produced a new page where users can learn in real time which Google services are available in China.
With regard to Google extensive business operations, we plan to continue our R & D work in China and will retain the sales team, however, the size of the sales team obviously depends in part on whether Chinese mainland users can access the Google.com.hk. Finally, we want to make it clear that all these decisions are made and implemented by the management team in the United States, and no Chinese employee can or should be responsible for these decisions. Since we posted our blog in January, they have stuck to their jobs, focusing on serving our Chinese users and customers, despite the uncertainty and difficulties they face. We are deeply proud to have such employees.
