March 22, 2010, 3:22 PM — Today at noon (Google Standard Time), Google announced on this page that "earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn." As a result, the post said, "users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk," which is the Hong Kong Google site, and which is uncensored.
Interestingly, Google claims that redirecting traffic to the uncensored Hong Kong site is "entirely legal," and they "very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services."
I'm predicting that the Chinese government will block access. After all, what has changed for Chinese users? From the user perspective, Google sites are now uncensored and in "simplified Chinese." Oh, and the letters in the address box are different. There is no way the Chinese Communist Party is going to decide that an uncensored Internet is fine, as long as the URL is different.
What do you think?
