Fascinating. With Google, Yahoo! Microsoft and Cisco about to be called on the carpet in Congress on Wednesday, AOL releases a new Chinese-language portal. It focuses on culture and sports, with a major feature being downloadable Chinese movies. But the target audience is – at least officially – meant to be the Chinese-speaking community in the United States.
I can confirm: the search engine on this portal is uncensored. Searches for “Falun Gong” and “Tiananmen Square Massacre” turn up the full range of results from dissident and human rights websites. I can also report that according to my friends in China, so far the AOL Chinese portal is not blocked from within the People’s Republic. Yet. However one blogger in Southern China reports that some content is inaccessible. But the language he uses implies the blocking may be for geographical copyright reasons rather than political reasons. It will be interesting to see how accessible the site remains from the PRC over the coming weeks.
The timing of AOL’s release is pretty interesting – one wonders if they are launching the portal now to gain maximum praise for not censoring at a time when their competitors are in the censorship doghouse.
Let’s hear it for competition. And here’s more on Yahoo!’s latest action.