14 DAY TRIAL // With all the focus on Iran lately and its attempts at blocking many social networking services and other sites, it's easy to forget the biggest state that regularly dabbles in online censorship and the arbitrary blocking of web sites, namely China.
While the recent blocking of Twitter, Flickr and the banning of certain search topics on Google.cn around the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre hasn't received any official comment, at least the Mountain View, California-based company has made a statement about a recent request by the Chinese government to remove some functions of its search engine.
China made several previous requests that the company disabled its Google Suggest feature on account that it linked to suggestive or vulgar content too often and now it seems that Google has complied. The New York Times reports that Google executives met with Chinese government officials earlier this week to discuss the request.
Google had apparently been warned in April and June and threatened with sanctions but had that far made no changes. The Google Suggest feature is now completely disabled on the Google.cn site.
"We are undertaking a thorough review of our service and taking all necessary steps to fix any problems with our results. This has been a substantial engineering effort, and we believe we have addressed the large majority of the problem results," Google said in a statement regarding the government's request.
However, Google has so far declined to comment on the issues around the date of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre when all searches containing any reference to the square, even those not related to the incident, like tourism information and pictures were blocked for several days. The search giant is saying that it’s trying to stay neutral and open but has so far made some controversial moves in China but which the company claims to have been necessary to comply with the local laws and regulations.