Two thumbs up for Google
Google and China are at war. About two months ago, Google found that hackers from mainland China were attacking the e-mail accounts of overseas opposition groups ,which prompted Google to stop censorship on its search engine. China, in retaliation, accused Google of breaking the censorship laws and then threatened to block the site. On March 22, Google decided to retreat and fight the battle from Hong Kong instead, rerouting the China Google site to the Hong Kong site.
It takes some guts to stand up to one of the biggest countries in the world known for its aggressive quashing of free speech. The world has seen failed attempts to break the censorship wall mostly by small overseas companies. But this is Google, and we have yet to see Google fail at something. Okay, so maybe their Google Wave wasn’t the greatest and this Buzz thing is rather annoying, but Google hasn’t had a major failure at anything yet. People make a government, not the other way around. They deserve to know the news that is not affected by government propaganda. Google’s first blow to the censorship wall may affect it’s business but will be good for those in mainland China.
So hooray for Google.
Then again, I could be biased. I wrote this from Google Docs.