Google announced today that it had come to a decision about the ongoing issues with China: it will continue to offer services there, but only through servers based in Hong Kong.
Google announced on January 12 that, due to a sophisticated cyber attack originating in China, it would no longer be offering censored services to the massive country. Since then, China and Google have been embroiled in a dispute over the matter, with China claiming that the search engine would need to enforce censorship if it wished to legally operate within China, and Google crying in the name of free speech that it wasn’t possible to do so.
Today, Google declared that they had come to a decision over the matter. Uncensored Google services will continue in China, but they will be based solely in Hong Kong. Users will now be directed from Google.cn to Google.com.hk. Since Hong Kong operates under a different government than the rest of China given its British governance until 1997, it is not illegal to have an uncensored internet there, unlike the rest of the country. Google warned that users might have slowed service for a short period of time while the servers adjust to the increased load.
“We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced—it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China,” Google said in a blog post. “We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services.”
Google has also started a website that will allow users to track what Google services are available at a given time. Since China can block Google access to mainland China at any time, this could be an essential tool for users that wish to continue using Google.
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