BRUSSELS (AP) — Google Inc.’s top lawyer said Wednesday that the world’s leading search engine is asking the U.S. and European governments to press China to lift Internet censorship, describing it as an unfair barrier to free trade.

David Drummond told reporters that western states should defend the free trade in information with the same kind of rules that they use to complain of China’s below-cost sale of products.

He said government talks are “the only way that it’s going to change, that this tide of censorship or this rising censorship is going to be arrested.”

The company sparred with Chinese leaders earlier this year when it stopped self-censoring its search results in line with Chinese rules after it said Chinese hackers had tried to plunder its software coding and hijack the Gmail accounts of human rights activists.

Since late March, Google has been redirecting search requests from mainland China to Hong Kong, which doesn’t have the same restrictions.

“The cyber attack was sort of the final straw because we felt that it was increasingly hard to do business there in accordance with our values,” Drummond said, describing the company as in danger of becoming “part of the same apparatus” of Chinese state censorship.

“Censorship, in addition to being a human rights problem, is a trade barrier,” he said. “If you look at what China does — the censorship, of course, is for political purposes but it is also used as a way of keeping multinational companies disadvantaged in the market.”

“It should be obvious that the Internet sector is very important to the west and so we should be working on seeing that that kind of trade is protected,” he said.

Drummond would not comment on whether he believed the United States could take a case under World Trade Organization rules against China, which can ultimately allow the U.S. to seek trading rights in compensation for any proven harm to its companies.

Instead, he said new trade rules may be needed to cover the Internet.

“Under a lot of trade rules, there’s still this notion that domestic media markets should be off limits to trade and that’s got to change,” he said.

He said he’d had some support in discussions with the U.S., French and German governments and with the European Union executive for pressing Google’s case and Chinese restrictions on the Internet in bilateral and multilateral talks.

The European Union persistently raises human rights issues with China, usually without much success. Indeed, a Chinese state multibillion dollar buying spree to Europe last year pointedly shunned France after President Nicolas Sarkozy threatened to boycott the opening of the Beijing Olympics over unrest in Tibet. China refuses to hold talks with the Tibetan government in exile.

In my opinion, censorship investigation in China Internet really has a terrible influence to foreign enterprises which have business with China. You see, nowadays, more and more company choose internet business and advertisement even customer service. All part of their business can’t be separated with the cyber world. But in China, maybe they have to face a lots of problems that can’t be solved. For example, their web site maybe can’t access for the reason that the host which served their web service is blocked. Or you can say they can do all the business via their own VPN connection or some other way, but how about their customers ? Their Google ads would fail to convince the Chinese people just because the suck CCTV always said that Google is bad and evil. Their twitter client service would fail to receive customers’ feed back just because twitter can’t be access here…

So I agree with the point that WTO should get involved in this case. Just tear down the Internet finance barrier !

PS: I have on idea about the human right arguments in the above article.Just hate the stupid Chinese Great LAN and censorship investigation.

3/22/2010 12:03:00 PM

On January 12, we announced on this blog that Google and more than twenty other U.S. companies had been the victims of a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China, and that during our investigation into these attacks we had uncovered evidence to suggest that the Gmail accounts of dozens of human rights activists connected with China were being routinely accessed by third parties, most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on their computers. 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 websites 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.

So earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from Google.com.hk. Due to the increased load on our Hong Kong servers and the complicated nature of these changes, users may see some slowdown in service or find some products temporarily inaccessible as we switch everything over.

Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. 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. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China.

In terms of Google’s wider business operations, we intend to continue R&D work in China and also to maintain a sales presence there, though the size of the sales team will obviously be partially dependent on the ability of mainland Chinese users to access Google.com.hk. Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them. Despite all the uncertainty and difficulties they have faced since we made our announcement in January, they have continued to focus on serving our Chinese users and customers. We are immensely proud of them.

God damned !

Lu Xun advocates the Fetch-and-Take principle, said that we should learn the good things from other countries and use them to help our selves. But Fetch-and-Take is not Ask-and-take. Nowadays, more and more people are keen on being a Ask-and-take. They consider that the web is only a resource base to them, all they have to do is just stretch their hand and someone will hand over what they want. And the worse is that more and more children and teenage are joining the “Stretch Hand Party”. For example, in a English learning chat group, someone like to interrupt to ask what’s the meaning of one simple word that could find out in a on-line dictionary very simple. Or some newbie that even doesn’t know how to speak “Ubuntu” came to ask me some very simple Linux problems that posted on the top of many popular Linux forums.

Let me google that for you is a funny site that help people to get rid of those “Stretch Hand Party” members. It help me to solve some bore-some problems and the more important, help more and more those guys learn how to make it by their hands.

Of course, Let’s try it out~

Then I noticed that this is a CVS version software. Cause we need the CVS support and some libraries.
But for the damn slow network connection to the source host… I have to give up and go to bed~
I will try it again tomorrow

Finally, the install was finished. But…

OMG, Is there Anybody can fix it?