Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that Google’s allegations of censorship and online sabotage by China raised "very serious concerns."In a statement, Clinton said Google had briefed the State Department on possible plans to pull out of China.
"We look to the Chinese government for an explanation. The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy," she said. "I will be giving an address next week on the centrality of Internet freedom in the 21st century, and we will have further comment on this matter as the facts become clear."
Google said Tuesday it would stop censoring search results on Google.cn. That would allow users to find politically sensitive photos and websites abroad, though downloading them might still be barred by government filters. It also said it had discovered that computer hackers had tricked human-rights activists into exposing their e-mail accounts to outsiders.
On Wednesday, Google.cn said its top search term of the day was "Tiananmen," possibly because of Web surfers looking for material on the government’s violent 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests.
The No. 2 search topic was "Google leaving China."
China’s foreign ministry and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press, but the state news agency Xinhua cited an unidentified official as saying the government was seeking more information from Google.
China has the world’s most populous Internet market, with 338 million people online as of June, and foreign Internet companies eager for a share of that.
Google created its China-based Google.cn site in 2006, agreeing to censor results by excluding sites to which access was blocked by government filters, popularly known as the Great Firewall of China.
Despite that cooperation, Beijing accused Google last year of spreading pornography, and access to the site was temporarily blocked.
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