In response to Google’s recent tactic of redirecting Chinese users to its uncensored Hong Kong site (Google.hk), the Chinese government began disabling certain searches or blocking the results, according to The New York Times.
In a way, it’s back to square one — for users in China, Google is still censored, just as it was before.
There will be further repercussions for Google; for example, China Mobile is expected to cancel a deal that was supposed to make Google its default mobile search provider. But one cannot escape the feeling that Google’s entire anti-censorship episode didn’t have much success, at least from the perspective of Internet users in China.
In its blog post from yesterday, Google said it hopes that the Chinese government will respect its decision, announcing it will be “carefully monitoring access issues.” Well, there’s definitely an access issue now; the question is: What will Google’s next move be?
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