09/11/2002

China's blocking of two popular foreign search engines appears to be an escalation of government policy to control internet content and protect commercial revenues for domestic players.

Initially interpreted as routine security precautions taken in the lead-up to November's top leadership meeting, the Google and Altavista engines may in fact be victims of a broader policy to bring the sector under tight state control.

The government has not officially confirmed that it has blocked the sites, [...].

But a detailed anonymous posting yesterday on the website of the People's Daily, the Communist party's paper, complained that search engines such as Google were "unselective" and "unsupervised".

The article compared Google unfavourably with Yahoo.com, which has signed an agreement with the security authorities to block critical content.

"Yahoo made an agreement with China not to act wantonly and at this point is well behaved," the writer said. As a result, searches in China on Yahoo about the banned spiritual [group], Falun Gong, for example, are either blocked or give access to sites critical of the body and its leaders.

[...]

"At the same time, its server is based in North America and not subject to supervision by the related department - how can China tolerate this?"

As if to underscore this point, in recent days, visitors to Google.com in China have been re-routed to different, and largely inferior, local search engines.

The blocking has angered many thousands of the nation's growing internet community, including white-collar workers, IT professionals, researchers and also ordinary web surfers.

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