Twitter Can Censor Tweets

First appeared in USA Today

Twitter has refined its technology so it can censor messages on a country-by-country basis.

The additional flexibility announced Thursday is likely to raise fears that Twitter's commitment to free speech may be weakening as the short-messaging company expands into new countries in an attempt to broaden its audience and make more money.

But Twitter sees the censorship tool as a way to ensure individual messages, or "tweets," remain available to as many people as possible while it navigates a gauntlet of different laws around the world.

Before, when Twitter erased a tweet it disappeared throughout the world. Now, a tweet containing content breaking a law in one country can be taken down there and still be seen elsewhere.

Twitter will post a censorship notice whenever a tweet is removed. That's similar to what Internet search leader Google Inc. has been doing for years when a law in a country where its service operates requires a search result to be removed.

Like Google, Twitter also plans to the share the removal requests it receives from governments, companies and individuals at the chillingeffects.org website.

The similarity to Google's policy isn't coincidental. Twitter's general counsel is Alexander Macgillivray, who helped Google draw up its censorship policies while he was working at that company.

"One of our core values as a company is to defend and respect each user's voice," Twitter wrote in a blog post. "We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can't. The tweets must continue to flow."

Twitter, which is based in San Francisco, is tweaking its approach now that its nearly 6-year-old service has established itself as one of the world's most powerful megaphones. Daisy chains of tweets already have played instrumental roles in political protests throughout the world, most notably in the uprising that overthrew Egypt's government a year ago.

It's a role that Twitter has embraced, but the company came up with the new filtering technology in recognition that it will likely be forced to censor more tweets as it pursues an ambitious agenda. Among other things, Twitter wants to expand its audience from about 100 million active uses now, to more than 1 billion.

Reaching that goal will require expanding into more countries, which will mean Twitter will be more likely to have to submit to laws that run counter to the free-expression protections guaranteed under the First Amendment in the U.S.

If Twitter defies a law in a country where it has employees, those people could be arrested. That's one reason Twitter is unlikely to try to enter China, where its service is currently block. Google for several years agreed to censor its search results in China to gain better access to the country's vast population, but stopped that practice two years after engaging in a high-profile showdown with Chain's government. Google now routes its Chinese search results through Hong Kong, where the censorship rules are less restrictive.

In its Thursday blog post, Twitter said it hadn't yet used its ability to wipe out tweets in an individual country. All the tweets it has previously censored were wiped out throughout the world. Most of those included links to child pornography.

Google Changes China Access after Beijing Objects

Associated Press

 

Google Inc. said Tuesday it will stop automatically routing users in China to its Hong Kong site after Beijing threatened the company with the loss of its Internet license in their latest skirmish over censorhip.

Google shut down its China-based search engine March 22 to avoid cooperating with the communist government's Internet censorship and has rerouted users to Hong Kong. But Google said regulators told the company its Internet license, which allows it to operate a music download service and other features in China, would not be renewed after it expires Wednesday if that tactic continues.

"They made it clear to us that they did not think the redirect was acceptable," said a Google spokeswoman, Jessica Powell. She declined to say what reasons the government gave for its objections.

The loss of permission to operate a China-based website would damage Google's access to an Internet market that already is the world's biggest and still growing fast, with 384 million people online at the end of 2009.

Under the new measure, instead of being automatically switched to Hong Kong, visitors to Google.cn see a tab that says, "We have moved to google.com.hk." Clicking on that takes users to the Chinese-language site in Hong Kong, which is Chinese territory but has Western-style civil liberties with no Internet filtering.

Automatic rerouting would end completely in the next few days, Google's chief legal officer David Drummond said on a company blog, leaving open the possibility that some users still were being switched to Hong Kong on Tuesday.

There was no immediate word from Beijing about whether the move was sufficient for Google to keep its Internet license.

"This new approach is consistent with our commitment not to self-censor and, we believe, with local law," said Drummond.

"We are therefore hopeful that our license will be renewed on this basis so we can continue to offer our Chinese users services via Google.cn."

But Chinese regulators might not be satisfied, said Edward Yu, president of Analysys International, an Internet research firm in Beijing.

"It's not clear today whether just doing it that way is also permitted," Yu said.

Google's popularity in China was unhurt by the automatic rerouting and advertising revenues stayed strong, Yu said. But he said the added click to reach Hong Kong, if Chinese regulators allow Google to operate that way, might drive away some users.

"If traffic is hurt, then advertisers will panic and cut spending," he said.

A foreign ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, said he had not seen Google's announcement and could not comment on it. However, he added, "I would like to stress that the Chinese government encourages foreign enterprises to operate in China according to law."

Beijing encourages Internet use for business and education but tries to block access to pornography or subversive material.

Google launched its China-based site in 2006 after the filters blocked many Chinese users from reaching its main site.

The Mountain View, California-based company announced in January it no longer wished to comply with Chinese censorship and said hackers working from China tried to steal its code and break into e-mail accounts of human rights activists.

The statement was an embarrassment for China's leaders, who want foreign companies to help develop its technology industries.

Google hopes to keep a research center in China, an advertising sales team that generates most of its revenue in the country and a fledgling mobile phone business.

It has a 30 percent share of China's search traffic, versus 60 percent for local rival Baidu Inc. Baidu is expected to pick up any advertising lost by Google but industry analysts say the lack of competition if the U.S. company leaves could slow the development of what Chinese leaders see as an important industry.

In a statement June 8, the government said the Internet played an "irreplaceable role in accelerating the development of the national economy." But it vowed to keep a tight grip on online content and to block subversive material.

Regulators block websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to prevent dissidents and human rights or Tibet activists from using them to spread criticism of Beijing.

China Targets 'Foreign Forces' in Web Crackdown

Associated Press

The home of Internet Hack Attacks -- China -- now wants to target 'foreign forces' in Web crackdown

 

China will target online information from "overseas hostile forces" in its next crackdown to tighten Internet controls, a government spokesman said in comments reported Monday.

The announcement gave no details about which groups might be targeted but Beijing sometimes accuses political, human rights, Tibet and other activists abroad of trying to undermine communist rule.

The move is part of efforts to step up a crackdown on online smut, gambling, fraud and other offenses, said Wang Chen, chief of the Cabinet's Information Office, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

"We will strengthen the blocking of harmful information from outside China to prevent harmful information from being disseminated in China and withstand online penetration by overseas hostile forces," Wang was quoted as saying.

Beijing encourages Internet use for business and education but tries to block material deemed subversive or pornographic and operates an extensive system of Web monitoring and censorship. Regulators block access to websites abroad run by political and human rights activists and some news organizations.

U.S.-based Google Inc. moved its China-based search engine to Hong Kong last month after announcing it no longer wanted to cooperate with Chinese online censorship.

China's population of Internet users, already by far the world's largest, has surpassed 400 million, with 233 million users getting access through mobile phones, according to weekend reports by state media, also citing Wang.

Beijing has launched repeated crackdowns against online pornography and fraud and has taken steps in recent months to block use of the Web by activists to spread criticism of the government.

China on Thursday strengthened a law to require telecommunications and internet companies to inform on customers who discuss state secrets - an area so broadly defined that both companies and Chinese citizens have struggled to know just what a state secret is.

In February, the government announced that individuals who want to operate websites must meet in person with regulators and submit photos of themselves.

In April, three people who posted material online about the death of a pregnant woman in police custody were sentenced to prison by a court in southern China. They were convicted of slander.

Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Cease Registering New Web Sites in China

The Washington Post

Two major Internet domain name registration companies have ceased registering Web sites in China in response to intrusive new government rules that require applicants to provide extensive personal data, including photographs of themselves. 

GoDaddy.com, the world's largest domain name registration company, and Network Solutions, based in Herndon, objected to policies that were imposed by China in December. 

The rules, Go Daddy said, are an effort by China to increase monitoring and surveillance of Web site content and could put individuals who register their sites with the firm at risk. The company also said the rules will have a "chilling effect" on new domain name registrations. 

The decisions come amid a showdown between China and Google, which recently announced it will no longer censor search results on its site in the country. Analysts and human rights advocates have warned that China's insistence on censorship and control over information is becoming a serious barrier to trade. 

Go Daddy announced its decision at a congressional hearing on Wednesday. 

"Go Daddy and Google deserve more than praise for doing the right thing in China -- they deserve our government's support," said Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), who has sponsored a bill that would prevent U.S. companies from sharing personal user information with "Internet-restricting" countries. 

In December, China began to enforce a new policy that required any registrant of a new .cn domain name to provide a color, head-and-shoulders photograph and other business identification, including a Chinese business registration number and physical, signed registration forms. That data was to be forwarded to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), a quasi-governmental agency. Most domain name registries require only a name, address, telephone number and e-mail address. 

"We were immediately concerned about the motives behind the increased level of registrant verification being required," Christine N. Jones, general counsel of the Go Daddy Group, told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. "The intent of the procedures appeared, to us, to be based on a desire by the Chinese authorities to exercise increased control over the subject matter of domain name registrations by Chinese nationals." 

Go Daddy has been registering domain names since 2000 and has more than 40 million domain names under management. 

Jones said China was the first government to retroactively seek additional verification and documentation of registrants. 

Jones also said Go Daddy customers with Chinese domain names have recently been attacked more frequently than in the past. The sites targeted tend to be those "deemed not appropriate" by Beijing -- sites that contain content about the Tiananmen Square uprising or human rights, for instance. 

"When our sites get shut down in China, we are never told why . . . and it's impossible to know why," Jones said. 

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment. 

Network Solutions said it stopped taking new accounts in China last December, according to spokeswoman Susan Wade. 

"Of course the decision affects our businesses, but it also didn't make business sense to operate under their change of procedures," she said. 

Arvind Ganesan, business and human rights director at Human Rights Watch, said China's new rules are yet another example of the country tightening its censorship policies and undermining the ability of U.S. companies to operate freely. 

"The underlying intent is if you're engaging in political speech, we want to know who's engaging in it and what Web site is behind it," Ganesan said. "This is a way the Chinese government can send a chilling message to people that they shouldn't speak freely online. It's forcing us companies to be both the censor and the spy on behalf of the Chinese government." 

Jones said Go Daddy's decision to stop registering new domains was unrelated to Google's recent decision. 

"With all due respect, this has nothing to do with Google," she said. She added that the company had been deliberating what it would do about its business in China before Google's announcement. 

"We decided we didn't want to be agents of China," she said. 

At Wednesday's hearing, Alan Davidson, Google's director of public policy, said governments worldwide should develop new rules to combat unfair trade barriers online and should make Internet freedom part of the criteria for receiving development aid. He noted that the number of governments that routinely censor the Internet has grown from a handful in 2002 to more than 40 today. 

Google Defies China Self-Censorship, Increasing Odds of Exit From Country

Bloomberg

Google Inc. defied China’s self- censorship rules by redirecting mainland Chinese users to an unfiltered Hong Kong Web site, threatening its ability to operate in the world’s largest Internet market.

The move escalated a two-month dispute as the government said Google broke its promise and was “totally wrong,” according to the official Xinhua news agency. Google, which had censored results on the Chinese site since its 2006 debut, said yesterday it plans to keep its research operations in the mainland.

The U.S. government said it was “disappointed” Google and China failed to reach a compromise. The conflict has contributed to a deterioration in relations between the two countries, following disagreements over weapon sales to Taiwan and the valuation of the yuan.

“Google is playing a very dangerous game,” said Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst at business consultant Enderle Group in San Jose, California. “They could end up doing more damage than good.”

The size of Google’s China sales workforce will partially depend on the accessibility of the Hong Kong site, the company said in a statement yesterday. Google employs more than 600 workers in the country and it “can’t rule out the possibility of lay-offs,” company spokeswoman Jessica Powell said in phone interview today.

‘Falun Gong,’ Tiananmen Square

Searches from Beijing and Shanghai for outlawed terms related to the Falun Gong movement and 1989 Tiananmen Square military crackdown yielded error messages today, indicating the Hong Kong site is subject to the same restrictions as overseas Web portals including Google.com. The nation’s Web censorship system has been dubbed “The Great Firewall of China.”

China had an estimated 384 million Internet users at the end of 2009, more than the total U.S. population. Baidu Inc. held 58.6 percent of China’s online search market last quarter, compared with 35.6 percent for Google, according to Analysys International, a Beijing-based technology research company.

“It’s very likely that Google.com.hk will be blocked at least as aggressively as Google.com was and, more likely, probably more aggressively,” said Ben Schachter, an analyst at Broadpoint AmTech Inc. in San Francisco.

Brin Instigated Move

Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google, pushed the company’s executives to end censorship of Web-search results in China, a person familiar with the matter said in January. The two sides held discussions on Jan. 29 and Feb. 25, according to Xinhua.

These talks never produced any serious progress because China wasn’t willing to bend in its demand that search results be censored, the three people familiar with the matter said this week.

“The Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement,” Google said in a blog post. “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 fell $2.50 to $557.50 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading yesterday. The shares have declined 10 percent this year.

Good PR

“For Google, it’s probably negative that the company loses a large number of customers,” Yuuki Sakurai, chief executive officer of Tokyo-based Fukoku Capital Management Inc., which manages $7.5 billion. “Nevertheless, it could be good PR for Google since it fought against censorship.”

By dropping the censorship of its site, the company broke an agreement it made with the government when it entered the market, according to China’s State Council Information Office, Xinhua reported. The Chinese government has said the dispute damaged Sino-U.S. relations after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton backed Google.

“We have previously raised our concerns about this issue directly with the Chinese government,” said Mike Hammer, spokesman for President Barack Obama’s National Security Council. “As both President Obama and Secretary Clinton have stressed on several occasions, we are committed to Internet freedom and are opposed to censorship.”

China’s Move Next

Hong Kong has a separate government and economy -- a legacy of its role as a British territory until 1997. At the time of the handover, China promised to preserve Hong Kong’s capitalist system and free press for an additional 50 years.

The Hong Kong approach forces the Chinese government to take the next step, said Jason Helfstein, an analyst with Oppenheimer & Co. in New York.

“They’re putting the ball back in the Chinese government’s court,” said Helfstein, who rates the stock “outperform” and doesn’t own it. The government could entirely block Google’s service or redirect users to rival Baidu Inc., which leads the Chinese search market.

Google, owner of the world’s top search engine, in January threatened to stop censoring content after saying that it had been hacked from within China. The company said its systems were targeted by “highly sophisticated” attacks aimed at obtaining proprietary information and personal data belonging to human- rights activists who use the company’s Gmail e-mail service.

Government Denies Involvement

The Chinese government denied that it was involved in the attacks, Xinhua reported.

At least 20 other international companies in technology, finance and chemicals were similarly targeted, Google said at the time.

“We also made clear that these attacks and the surveillance they uncovered -- combined with attempts over the last year to further limit free speech on the Web in China including the persistent blocking of Web sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs and Blogger -- had led us to conclude that we could no longer continue censoring our results on google.cn,” Google said on the blog.

Google’s decision to stop filtering its Chinese search engine is an “indictment” of the government’s attempt to censor the Internet, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch said.

“China is one of the world’s largest economies, but hundreds of millions of Chinese Internet users are denied the basic access to information that people around the world take for granted,” Arvind Ganesan, the business and human-rights director for the U.S.-based group said in a statement.

Google Shuts China Site in Dispute Over Censorship
NY Times

Google to redirect China users to Uncensored site

SAN FRANCISCO — Just over two months after threatening to leave China because of censorship and intrusions from hackers, Google on Monday closed its Internet search service there and began directing users in that country to its uncensored search engine in Hong Kong.

While the decision to route Chinese users to Hong Kong is an attempt by Google to skirt censorship requirements without running afoul of Chinese laws, it appears to have angered officials in China, setting the stage for a possible escalation of the conflict, which may include blocking the Hong Kong search service in mainland China.

The state-controlled Xinhua news agency quoted an unnamed official with the State Council Information Office describing Google’s move as “totally wrong.”

“Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks,” the official said.

Google declined to comment on its talks with Chinese authorities, but said that it was under the impression that its move would be seen as a viable compromise.

“We got reasonable indications that this was O.K.,” Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder and its president of technology, said. “We can’t be completely confident."

Google’s retreat from China, for now, is only partial. In a blog post, Google said it would retain much of its existing operations in China, including its research and development team and its local sales force. While the China search engine, google.cn, has stopped working, Google will continue to operate online maps and music services in China.

Google’s move represents a powerful rejection of Beijing’s censorship but also a risky ploy in which Google, a global technology powerhouse, will essentially turn its back on the world’s largest Internet market, with nearly 400 million Web users.

“Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on google.cn has been hard,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote in the blog post. “The Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement.”

Mr. Drummond said that Google’s search engine based in Hong Kong would provide mainland users results in the simplified Chinese characters used on the mainland and that he believed it was “entirely legal.”

“We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision,” Mr. Drummond said, “though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services.” Some Western analysts say Chinese regulators could retaliate against Google by blocking its Hong Kong or American search engines entirely, just as it blocks YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Google’s decision to scale back operations in China ends a nearly four-year bet that Google’s search engine in China, even if censored, would help bring more information to Chinese citizens and loosen the government’s controls on the Web.

Instead, specialists say, Chinese authorities have tightened their grip on the Internet in recent years. In January, Google said it would no longer cooperate with government censors after hackers based in China had stolen some of the company’s source code and even broken into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights advocates.

“It is certainly a historic moment,” said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet project at the University of California, Berkeley. “The Internet was seen as a catalyst for China being more integrated into the world. The fact that Google cannot exist in China clearly indicates that China’s path as a rising power is going in a direction different from what the world expected and what many Chinese were hoping for.”

While other multinational companies are not expected to follow suit, some Western executives say Google’s decision is a symbol of a worsening business climate in China for foreign corporations and perhaps an indication that the Chinese government is favoring home-grown companies. Despite its size and reputation for innovation, Google trails its main Chinese rival, Baidu.com, which was modeled on Google, with 33 percent market share to Baidu’s 63 percent.

The decision to shut down google.cn will have a limited financial impact on Google, which is based in Mountain View, Calif. China accounted for a small fraction of Google’s $23.6 billion in global revenues last year. Ads that once appeared on google.cn will now appear on Google’s Hong Kong site. Still, abandoning a direct presence in the largest Internet search market in the world could have long-term repercussions and thwart Google’s global ambitions, analysts say.

Government officials in Beijing have sharpened their attacks on Google in recent weeks. China experts say that it may be some time before the confrontation is resolved.

“This has become a war of ideas between the American company moralizing about Internet censorship and the Chinese government having its own views on the matter,” said Emily Parker, a senior fellow at the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “The story is really just beginning.”

In China, many students and professionals said they feared they were about to lose access to Google’s vast resources.

Last January, when Google initially threatened to leave China, many young people there placed wreaths at the company headquarters in Beijing as a sign of mourning.

The attacks were aimed at Google and more than 30 other American companies. While Google did not say the attacks were sponsored by the government, the company said it had enough information about the attacks to justify its threat to leave China.

People, inside and outside of Google, investigating the attacks have since traced them to two universities in China: Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School.

The universities and the Chinese government have denied any involvement in the attacks.

After serving Chinese users through its search engine based in the United States, Google decided to enter the Chinese market in 2006 with a local search engine under an arrangement with the government that required it to purge search results on banned topics.

But since then, Google has struggled to comply with Chinese censorship rules and failed to gain significant market share from Baidu.com.

Google is not the first American Internet company to stumble here. Nearly every major American brand has arrived with high hopes only to be stymied by government rules or fierce competition from Chinese rivals.

After struggling to compete in China, Yahoo sold its Chinese operations to Alibaba Group, a local company; eBay and Amazon never gained traction; and Microsoft’s MSN instant messaging service badly trails that of Tencent.

Google’s departure could present an opportunity for Baidu, whose stock has soared since the confrontation between Google and China began. It could also give a chance to Microsoft, a perennial underdog in Internet search, to make inroads in the Chinese market. Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, has a very small share of the market.

Many analysts say the government has favored and aided Chinese Internet start-ups, but that those businesses have also out maneuvered American companies.

Google Tried to Enlist Companies as Allies After Cyber Attack‏

Bloomberg

Google Inc. approached other companies to seek their help drawing attention to a cyber attack from China last month and was frustrated by their reluctance to come forward, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Google announced this week that it was one of at least 20 companies targeted in a “highly sophisticated” computer attack and wanted others to talk about the incident, the person said. The companies refused, and Google made the announcement by itself, the person said.

Since then, three other companies, Adobe Systems Inc., Juniper Networks Inc. and Rackspace Hosting Inc., have said they were targeted by cyber attacks. The reluctance of companies to join Google in its initial announcement illustrates the pressure on them to protect their business in China, the world’s third- largest economy, said Barry James, who helps manage $2 billion at James Investment Research in Xenia, Ohio.

“Companies are not going to be cutting off their nose to spite their face,” James said. “It’s an underlying problem that exists in terms of dealing with a country where they don’t necessarily follow all the same rules that we do. More experienced firms have a better grip on how to navigate that.”

In disclosing the attacks, Google said it plans to stop censoring Web-search results in China, a move that may lead to the closing of its Chinese site and offices in the country. Mountain View, California-based Google said the attacks were directed at e-mail accounts of human-rights activists.

Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for Google, declined to comment on how the company handled the matter.

China Revenue

Google probably can afford to leave China, said Marshall Meyer, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

“If they were making a lot of money, I don’t think they’d do this,” said Meyer, who teaches an MBA course on how companies operate in China. “You have to cultivate good relationships with the government -- no way around it.”

Less than 2 percent of Google’s $21.8 billion in revenue came from China last year, according to Jefferies & Co. By comparison, China accounted for 13 percent of Intel Corp.’s sales in 2008, the last time the company disclosed results from the country. Cisco Systems Inc. made 11 percent of its revenue from the Asia Pacific region, excluding Japan, in the most recent quarter.

Google rose $1.87 to $591.72 at 9:32 a.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The stock has almost doubled in the past year.

‘All About Profit’

Dan Slane, chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a federal agency, said he was surprised more companies aren’t standing up with Google.

“It’s all about profit, and I understand where the silence is coming from, but they are missing the long-term picture,” Slane said in an interview. Chinese leaders’ “end game is to extract as much technology out of American companies as they can, transfer that to their own companies and, when they feel those companies have reached a level of technical maturity, show the American companies the door.”

Google co-founder Sergey Brin pushed the company’s executives to take a stand against the attacks and end its censorship of Web-search results in China, according to another person familiar with the matter. As part of the discussion, Google executives analyzed the financial effect of the company leaving China, the person said.

Yahoo! Inc., the second most used U.S. search engine, was also among the companies targeted by the attack in China, a person familiar with the matter said this week. Yahoo, which said it “stands aligned” with Google in condemning Chinese cyber attacks on users, said that it doesn’t generally disclose attacks on its computer systems.

Microsoft’s Stance

Technology companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Intel have spent years building businesses in China, the world’s largest Internet and mobile-phone market.

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said yesterday in an interview with Bloomberg Television that his company intends to stay in China and wants to be “part of the solution” in the country.

Intel, the world’s biggest chipmaker, said there is no change in its view of the Chinese market and it hadn’t seen evidence of a “broad-based attack” on its systems.

“We have nothing to say concerning other companies’ views” of the Chinese market, said Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for the Santa Clara, California-based company.

Cisco, the world’s largest maker of networking equipment, said it’s closely following discussions of censorship in China.

“As Cisco is not a service or content provider and doesn’t participate in the censorship of information by any government, we cannot comment regarding the specifics of any of our industry peers,” the San Jose, California-based company said in a statement.

Google Tells China It Will End SERP Censorship

Guardian UK

Decision from world's leading search engine comes amid a clampdown on the internet in China over the last year

Google, the world's leading search engine, has thrown down the gauntlet to China by saying it is no longer willing to censor search results on its Chinese service.

The internet giant said the decision followed a cyber attack it believes was aimed at gathering information on Chinese human rights activists.

The move follows a clampdown on the internet in China over the last year, which has seen sites and social networking services hosted overseas blocked – including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube – and the closure of many sites at home. Chinese authorities ­criticised Google for supplying "vulgar" content in results.

Google acknowledged that the decision "may well mean" the closure of Google.cn and its offices in China.

That is an understatement, given that it had to agree to censor sensitive material – such as details of human rights groups and references to the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 – to launch Google.cn.

Google was in contact with the US state department before its announcement. Spokesman PJ Crowley said: "Every nation has an obligation, regardless of the origin of malicious cyber activities, to keep its part of the network secure.

"That includes China. Every nation should criminalise malicious activities on computer networks."

In a post on the official Google Blog, the company outlined a "highly sophisticated and targeted" attack in December which it believes affected at least 20 other firms: "These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered, combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web, have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.

"We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all."

Hillary Clinton stepped into the debate, urging Beijing to respond to Google's announcement.

The US secretary of state said in a statement: "We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation."

She added: "The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy."

Human Rights Watch praised the decision and urged other firms to follow suit in challenging censorship. "A transnational attack on privacy is chilling, and Google's response sets a great example," said Arvind Ganesan, director of the group's corporations and human rights programme.

Google said the cyber attack originated from China and that its intellectual property was stolen, but that evidence suggested a primary goal was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Two accounts were accessed but Google believed only account information and subject lines were obtained. It is notifying the other targeted companies and working with US authorities.

Its investigation had shown that, separately, the accounts of dozens of US-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appeared to have been routinely accessed by third parties.

The company added that it was sharing the information not just because of the security and human rights implications "but because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech".

Acknowledging the potential consequences, it stressed: "This move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China."

The message, headlined "A New Approach to China" and signed by David Drummond, senior vice-president of corporate development and chief legal officer, said the company launched Google.cn in 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China "outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results".

At the time Google promised to monitor conditions in China and reconsider its approach if necessary.

But Evgeny Morozov, an expert on the political effects of the internet and a Yahoo fellow at Georgetown University, questioned why Google had made the decision after four years.

"They knew pretty well what they were getting into. Now it seems they are playing the innocence card ... It's like they thought they were dealing with the government of Switzerland and suddenly realised it was China," he said.

Morozov said it was hard to see the logical connection between the security of human rights activists and Google's self-censorship, particularly given that the firm had chosen not to comment on whom it believed responsible for the hacking. It had become easier for "pretty much anyone" to launch cyber attacks in the last few years, he added.

He added that it could have been damaging for Google if news of the breach had emerged later and it appeared the company had done nothing.

Google has only a third of the search-engine market in China, which is dominated by the Chinese giant Baidu. Although its revenues have continued to rise, many analysts believed it was finding business hard going. In June Google suffered intensive disruption to search functions and Gmail for over an hour, after authorities told it to scale back search functions.

China has the world's largest internet population.

Rebecca MacKinnon, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, said her research showed Google had censored less than Baidu. Google's decision "certainly sets an example in terms of a company trying to do what's best for the user and not just whatever increases the profit margins", she added.

Nart Villeneuve, research fellow at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab – which examines the exercise of political power in cyberspace – said the decision to give such a full account of the attacks and link it to human rights issues was unprecedented.

Google's decision to launch the censored service was highly controversial at the time. It was attacked by campaigners and accused of "sickening collaboration" in a Congressional hearing.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry referred the Guardian to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. But an employee at MIIT said it was not responsible for handling the query, because it dealt with only the technical side of internet issues. He added that many other departments dealt with other aspects of internet management, but added that he did not know who the Guardian should contact in this instance.