As we covered on Friday, Google is on the verge of either ending its censorship of search results or pulling its business out of China, although insiders say that Google is trying to work out an agreement with a handful of agencies so it doesn't have to leave altogether. China's Minister of Industry and Information Technology, however, has made it clear that if the company doesn't respect Chinese laws with regards to censorship, "the consequences will be on you."
According to the Times, the government's warning to Google's partners is primarily meant to avoid confusion if China is forced to flip the switch on the Great Firewall to block Google's results. Like other parts of the world, there are numerous Chinese portals that use Google-powered search boxes on their sites, and readers might be a little more frustrated when it's not just Google.cn that's being blocked, but also sina.com.cn or ganji.com. Implementing a last-minute switch to another search service could be difficult for those sites, though, so it seems reasonable to expect that there will be some downtime for one and all.
According to some, however, Decision Day has already arrived: Silicon Alley Insider notes that Beijing resident Bill Bishop is already pulling up uncensored results for the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, which were previously blocked within China. Other taboo subjects remain inaccessible, however, meaning that the Tiananmen Square results are either a bug or evidence of Google testing the waters before going whole hog. Given the company's commitment to standing by its original word, we're going to guess the latter.
Source: Arstechnica.com
