Google investigating in China for service outages

Google said on Thursday it was investigating recent cuts in its services in China as the government once again accused the US Internet giant of providing links to pornography in its Web searches.



People surf the Internet in Jinan, eastern China's Shandong province. Google said on Thursday it was investigating recent cuts in its services in China as the government once again accused the US Internet giant of providing links to pornography in its Web searches.

"We understand that many users could not access Google.com in mainland China, along with linked services, such as Google Docs and Gmail, during the last 24 hours," Google China said in a statement emailed to AFP.

The statement said users also had reported that its Chinese language site Google.cn was briefly inaccessible on Wednesday evening.

"We are investigating the matter, and hope that (we) can restore all the services as soon as possible," it said.

Google promised last week to eliminate pornography from its Chinese Web searches after a government Internet watchdog accused it of continuing to provide links to lewd content.

The Google statement did not speculate on the possible cause of the service outages.

However, certain foreign websites are frequently blocked in China, with the nation's censors widely suspected of being behind the outages in their quest to prevent Chinese Web users viewing vulgar or politically sensitive content.

Asked whether the government was involved in the Google access problems, a foreign ministry spokesman said he had no details on the issue, instead accusing the company of continued transgressions.

"We have found that Google has spread a lot of pornographic content, which is a serious violation of Chinese laws and regulations," ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters, urging Google to abide by Chinese law.

China's system of Internet supervision is believed to be the most extensive in the world, and has been dubbed the "Great Firewall of China."

Computer makers were notified by the government recently that all personal computers sold from July 1 must be shipped with anti-pornography software, a move that has led to widespread censorship fears both inside and outside China.

The country has the world's largest online population at nearly 300 million Web users, and its Communist Party rulers have struggled to control a proliferation of online content in recent years.

Qin said China had noted Google's pledge to work at eliminating the spread of pornographic content.

"We hope that this issue will be dealt with as soon as possible," he said.

Google was among 19 large Internet portals that the government named in January as providing links to pornography, ordering them to clean up.

At the time, Google was singled out as having failed to take action on earlier government complaints that its search engine results contained a "massive number of links to pornographic web sites."
By: AFP