In LA

Citing political and ethical considerations, Google hasn’t yet launched its free email service, Gmail, in China. But why is this Gmail China login screen online?

Google, in order to comply with Chinese government policy, censors the search results it displays to users who access its www.google.com.cn site (that ‘cn’ at the end of the name indicates a Chinese website). This was big news a little while back, as it marked the moment that the company which proudly cites “Do No Evil” as one of its guiding principles made compromises for the sake of reach and profit that many outside China found distasteful. Google is in good company, Microsoft’s MSN Spaces blocks Chinese users from posting articles that include words like “democracy” and “freedom”, Skype’s text chat here censors certain words, and Yahoo has gone even further in its compliance with Chinese government censorship policies –I’ll return to this topic in a bit. All of these companies justify their actions by saying that they must comply with local regulations when they operate in other countries.Users in China who can read English (such as myself) can still search the web using the good ‘ol www.google.com URL, and get uncensored search results. It’s a pyrrhic victory — you can see the unfiltered results but the sites are generally blocked by the Great Firewall of China, so it feels as if Google is just returning many dead links. For an amusing visual look at how the censorship affects Google image results, see this great side-by-side comparison of a politically sensitive google image search.

Back when Google’s compliance with the Chinese government was a big news item, articles often contained statements such as the following:

Neither Google’s e-mail nor blogging services will be offered in China because the company doesn’t want to risk being ordered by the government to turn over anyone’s personal information.

This is because any company that plants its servers on Chinese soil will place information on those servers within reach of the Chinese government. If Google were to store user’s personal information on servers within China, the Chinese government could request for this information, and Google would have to comply or risk the consequences.

Yahoo found itself in exactly such a sticky situation last year. The Chinese government decided that information posted to the web by a user with an anonymous Yahoo email address was a state secret and asked Yahoo’s Hong Kong office to provide them with the user’s personal information. Yahoo complied, and former Yahoo user Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison. News of Yahoo’s disclosure of the anonymous user’s identity, and a recently discovered case of another unmasked Yahoo user who received an 8 year prison term for discussing pro-democracy issues in a web forum, has caused some people in Western countries to criticize, boycott, and perhaps even advocate divesting from Yahoo and other U.S. internet firms operating in China.

Which brings us back to Google and this post’s title. Google may not be ready yet, politically, to roll-out their anonymous gmail service to Chinese users, but they do appear to have some Gmail China functionality online, ready and waiting for the green light. I know this because out of simple curiousity I added a “.cn” to the “gmail.com” URL in my browser, and lo and behold I reached this Gmail China login screen. Attempts to login fail with a “can’t find the server at mail.google.com.cn” error. This suggests that the login screen is programmed to eventually bring registered users to their mail on servers in China.

I wonder when Gmail China will launch and what criteria Google, the “Don’t Be Evil” company, will use to decide when the time is right.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 12:01 am and is filed under China, Geeky, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.