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Yahoo, Google 'irresponsible' in China
Tuesday, July 28, 2004
The two search giants have come under fire from a human rights
organisation for the activities of subsidiaries in China.
Human rights organisation Reporters sans Frontières (RSF)
has accused two of the biggest names in search -- Yahoo! and Google
-- of deliberately conspiring to censor the Web.
RSF called the pair "irresponsible" for blocking some
content labelled as subversive by the Chinese government -- sites
relating to Tibet's independence, for example. Such sites disappear
from the Chinese language version of Yahoo and a Yahoo-parented
search engine, Yisou, while a local search engine that Google now
owns a share of, Baidu, also censors its results.
Google doesn't censor its own search results, however, except in
cases where there are legal issues -- such as prohibiting racist
sites turning up on French and German users' screens. RSF believes
the change in attitude is due to the pair's wish to conquer a potentially
lucrative and fast-growing market and says they are "making
compromises that directly threaten freedom of expression".
Without help from Google or Yahoo!, the Chinese government is left
to censor Web sites itself -- a more arduous task for the officials
and one that means the odd "subversive" site is more likely
to slip through the net, given the millions of homepages in existence.
The organisation is now calling on US politicians to protect the
rights of Chinese Web users.
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