Nanny Fails Sina Sohu China.com Search Engines

Censors: Your Best Is Not Good Enough

South China Morning Post via ESWN:

The search engines of two of the most popular Web portals on the mainland have been blocked ... Sina and Sohu are the latest victims of Beijing's increasing control of the internet for having failed to filter certain keywords deemed politically harmful, industry sources in Beijing said yesterday.

"Chief editors of Web portals were summoned to the State Council Information Office in the morning and Sina and Sohu were ordered to shut down their search engines after they failed an on-the-spot censorship test," one of the sources said. The two portals had been given three days to "rectify their mistakes", the source said.

Besides Sina's and Sohu's search engines, sou.china.com, another major portal, is also suspended at this moment.

Google.cn and MSN China Search (beta), which in my judgment must fail such censorship test, are not affected. The "favourable treatment" can be explained by the status as foreign companies. But it is not obvious why the Google-powered 163.com, another Nasdaq-listed Chinese portal, is not suspended.

The immediate impact may be limited since China's search market is dominated by Baidu and Google. But the Sword of Damocles shall put even more pressure on Baidu, which focuses on search and could not afford a single day of suspension. The censors might have been clever not to order the suspension of Baidu since such draconian move would backfire on the authority. After all, the most effective form of censorship is self-censorship. Killing the chickens is enough to scare the monkey.

Related:
List of Chinese search engines

Comments

[eswn]

I totally understand this:

Example:

Question from censor: Why are you allowing a thread about the controversy of Yu Jie-Wang Jie versus Guo Feixiong?

Answer: Look! I don't know who these people are! I have never heard of them. I tried to look them up on search engines and there is nothing. What was I supposed to do? Look, I'm willing to do anything that you instruct me to do, but I'm just a dumb country hick and I am no mind-reader!

[wang shijun]

hello

[wang shijun]

hello

[nursing jobs Los Angeles]

I am just interested if we are living in the world of freedom and choice or we are ruled by other people who can just inflict bans and allow us watching what they want.