Music Ally

Google has announced that it is abandoning its policy of censoring search results on its Chinese search engine, in response to a sophisticated cyber attack that tried to gain access to Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

“We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all,” writes SVP of corporate development and chief legal officer David Drummond. “We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

Why are we writing about this? Last year, Google launched a free ad-supported music downloads service in China. It was hailed for its piracy-deflating potential, not to mention the contrast between it and local search engine Baidu, which has provoked anger in the music industry by deep-linking to copyrighted songs in the past.

Don’t get us wrong: this is much bigger than music. Google squaring up to the Chinese government will be welcomed around the world – its original decision to censor search engine results there has been criticised often. But it will be interesting to see what the knock-on effects are at a time when the Chinese government is also trying to make the country more hospitable for legal music services.

Tags: China, Google

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Digital Music News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.