Google.com blocked in China: media watchdog

Agence France Presse
June 07, 2006

The Google.com search engine has been blocked in most parts of China, as Beijing steps up its efforts to restrict the public's access to information, a Paris-based media watchdog said.

Internet users in many major Chinese cities have had difficulty connecting to the uncensored international version of Google for the past week, Reporters Without Borders said in a statement received here Wednesday.

Aside from the Google.com search engine, Reporters Without Borders said the blocking was being gradually extended to the Google News and Google Mail services.

"Google has just definitively joined the club of western companies that comply with online censorship in China," Reporters Without Borders said.

"It is deplorable that Chinese Internet users are forced to wage a technological war against censorship in order to access banned content."

Random attempts to access Google.com in Beijing appeared to confirm that the international version of the search engine had indeed been made unavailable, while the censored Chinese-language version, Google.cn, was still accessible.

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