Google officially shuts down google.cn domain
by: Bradley Wint on March 23rd, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Google has confirmed the rumors by officially shutting down the google.cn domain, and pointing it to google.com.hk. After long talks with the Chinese government, they feel that censorship of searches is not the way to go, since to boys at Google believe in freedom on the Internet. The Chinese have taken a strong stance towards censorship and have not budged from their position on censoring Google searches. The number of hacking and phishing scams originating from China also added towards their decision.
They have not fully abandoned their Chinese market though. Redirecting to the Hong Kong servers allows visitors to use a search engine that is unfiltered in the Simple Chinese language. They have noted that the HK site may experience slow downs due to the sudden burst of new traffic but are working around the clock to get all the sub applications migrated to the new servers, in addition to adding more bandwidth to handle the load.
With regards to the staff members in China, the number of workers on the R&D team depends significantly on how much access the Chinese have to the new domain. According to Google the move is totally legal, so now we wait to see what the Chinese government has to say about the situation… or see what they do *cough* block the Honk Kong exchange.
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