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Google and Censorship

By Erica Naone All eyes have been on Google's battle with the Chinese government since the company announced on Monday that it would no longer maintain its censored Chinese-language search site. Instead, the company began redirecting users of Google.cn to its Hong Kong-based search service, Google.com.hk, where it maintains unaltered Chinese-language search results. However, China isn't the only front in Google's battle to protect its vision of an open Internet. When Google announced that it might cease operating Google.cn in January, David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development and the company's chief legal officer, wrote that "this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech." "These issues are coming up all over the world," says Cynthia Wong, Plesser Fellow and staff attorney at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, that promotes an open Internet. Wong says governments around the world are making policy decisions about material on the Internet--particularly when it comes to questions of child protection, copyright, and cyber attacks. She says it's tempting for them to ...