Auswirkungen von Googles neuer China-Strategie

Die Effekte der Aufhebung der Zensur von Suchergebnissen durch Google bzw. die Umleitung der .cn-Domain auf die Hongkong-Seite waren erst mal nur kurzfristiger Natur, schreibt die New York Times:

Searches for “Tiananmen,” “Falun Gong” and “corruption” increased by more than 10 times here on Tuesday, the day that Google began offering uncensored Chinese-language search results. But searches for censored terms on Google’s uncensored Hong Kong search engine fell off quickly in the next few days in part because most Chinese did not rush to search for politically delicate material and also because the pages newly revealed by Google were still mostly blocked in China. In tests over the weekend from several Chinese cities, users searching for “Tiananmen” or even the names of Chinese government leaders reliably found the site google.com.hk mysteriously inaccessible for a few minutes. The more frequently used Chinese search engine Baidu, which continues to censor its results, remained accessible no matter what users searched for. ... Nonetheless, a significant number of people took advantage of Google’s newly unfiltered service on its first day of operation. There were about 2.5 million searches for phrases containing “Tiananmen” and about 4.7 million searches for the banned religious group “Falun Gong,” according to estimates based on data from the Google Trends and Google Keyword Tool Box. But these are tiny numbers compared with almost 400 million Chinese Internet users, and search activity quickly returned to average levels over the next few days. ... Meanwhile, the Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign to eradicate pro-Google sentiments from the Internet. Comments on social networking sites that are supportive of Google “will be deleted in a couple of seconds,” said Oiwan Lam, 38, an independent journalist and researcher who is an expert on Chinese independent media.