What's Worse ?

If you've kept an occasional eye on Google's difficulties with the Chinese government - you'll know that the mandarins (ha!) in Beijing have been increasingly unhappy with Google's supposedly brave stance against censorship, which lately has involved nothing less blatant than an automatic redirect to their Hong Kong site... which provides results unfettered by China's requirements, which are then filtered by Chinese firewalls anyway, before the average user there gets a chance to see them.

A couple of days ago, Google announced a 'new approach'
"instead of automatically redirecting all our users..."
"and today we re-submitted our ICP license renewal application based on this approach"

Well, their 'new' plan consists of making http://google.cn/ into a make-believe 'landing page' where you can't make searches, or actually do anything - and a mouse-click anywhere at all results in... ? That's right !- an automatic redirect to their Hong Kong site.

I don't imagine that Google think for one moment, that this majorly minor non-change will assuage any Official misgivings about their operations over there - in fact, they seem to be saying
'hey world, we believe the Chinese government to be so backward in matters of the internet, that they won't notice this blatant ruse, ho ho'. Maybe they pulled a comical face too eh?.
.
Business, or rather Brinkmanship, as usual then.



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