Thursday, January 26, 2006

Brin on China Censorship

Google Co-founder Sergey Brin discusses the recent censorship issues with CNN:

“Essentially the great firewall is sophisticated enough that it would block connections based on sensitive queries. The end result was that we weren’t available to about 50 percent of the users. Universities can’t afford the international bandwidth, so for example students at Tsinghua University – and I saw this myself – had to pay in order to use Google, and I mean pay a lot, even 25 cents a megabyte, which would be unaffordable even by American standards. (...)

[A]nyhow the net effect is that all of our services... soon we will be largely unavailable. We ultimately made a difficult decision, but we felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese Web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it.”

[Thanks Brinke Guthrie.]

Brin on China Censorship by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (10)

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