Posted by : Anonymous on Sep 29, 2004 - 04:24 AM WebTechnology

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Google's new Chinese news service is omitting a handful of government-banned Web sites, prompting activists to charge that the Mountain View Internet search company is aiding China's efforts to censor controversial information. A U.S. company that creates software to get around China's Internet censorship, Dynamic Internet Technology, said it discovered that news stories from at least eight Web sites do not appear in Google's Chinese news Web site when accessed from within China. However, the same news can be accessed through Google News from outside of China.
Google acknowledged that headlines from government-banned Web sites were intentionally excluded from Google News because they are inaccessible within China's borders. The company said that providing links to inaccessible Web sites would degrade the ``search experience'' of its news site.

``Google has decided that in order to create the best possible search experience for our mainland China users we will not include sites whose content is not accessible,'' the company said in a statement, ``as their inclusion does not provide a good experience for our News users who are looking for information.''

The situation underscores the dilemma faced by media and technology companies that seek to do business in countries that restrict the flow of information. China presents a particularly tricky challenge because it is both a potentially huge marketplace for Internet companies and a country with some of the world's strictest government censorship.

Activists want Google to display headlines from the inaccessible news sites so that Chinese users will at least know what they are missing. But doing so could anger the Chinese government and risk Google News being banned entirely within the country.

``Google is in a tough position,'' said Jon Zittrain, an assistant professor of entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard Law School who has studied Chinese censorship. ``I think Google faces a problem common to many companies that are handling information deemed offensive, except Google does it in the spotlight.''

Google launched its Chinese Google News site Sept. 9. Like the U.S. version, the Chinese Google News aggregates news stories from many different sources. Google displays headlines and short excerpts from the stories, and links to the original Web sites. The Chinese version harvests news from about 1,000 sources in China, the United States, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Malaysia, Canada, France and Singapore.

On Sept. 16, Dynamic Internet Technology confirmed that stories from Epoch Times and Chinese News Net, two independent Chinese news sites, were unavailable when Google News was accessed from within China, but they were available from outside the country. Both sites are blocked by the Chinese government.

``We tried different keywords, and we found that they had removed news from those sources,'' said Bill Xia, an activist who is chief executive of DIT.

Xia said he wants Google to either display headlines from the sites, or work with groups such as DIT to help Chinese citizens access the news through other means.

``From a search engine, people want to know all the different opinions,'' Xia said. ``Especially in China. By removing that, they are helping China with media control.''

Xia said he suspected that the Chinese government pressured Google to remove the news sources. But Google said the decision was based solely on its belief that linking to blocked sites would harm a user's search experience at the Web site.

Google has faced censorship issues several times in its short history. The company removed a neo-Nazi Web site from its German index in response to a law there that bans such sites. And two years ago, the Chinese government completely blocked access to Google's main search site for more than a week.

China is especially aggressive in blocking access to the Internet. A 2002 study by Zittrain and law student Ben Edelman found more than 9 percent of the 203,000 Web sites they tested were inaccessible in China. The censorship affected sites dealing with dissidents, health, education and religion, as well as some foreign government sites.

In many cases, links to the Web sites will appear in search engine results, but they return error messages when users click on them.

Seth Finkelstein, an Internet filtering authority, said he suspects Google agreed to remove the Web sites from its Chinese news service as part of a deal with the Chinese government to lift its 2002 ban.

But Zittrain said he doubted there was any type of collusion and believes Google appears to have been forced into a difficult business decision.

``They have to face a decision if they want a footprint there,'' he said. ``If they offend the Chinese government, it will be hard to succeed there, which will make it impossible to offer the Chinese citizens any information.''

(c) 2004, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.). Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.