It is being widely reported that this looks like Google removing their censorship in China. What I see though, is Google finding a way to remove itself from the problems it faces in China.

"We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China." Google blog post

I think that some of the reports being made from this blog post are a little misleading (like this Guardian article). I don't think Google want to leave operations in China, however maybe this is the leverage that could make the government change their mind?... ...I think not.

I really wonder whether the Chinese Government would allow Google to remove it's censorship? If they do I get the feeling they might take the step of ultimately censoring internet access further up the chain, from behind the scenes.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out. What do you think will come of this latest news from Google?

The interenet regulator ICANN has now allowed web addresses to be in non-Latin characters – such as Chinese, Arabic, Hindi or Russian Cyrillic script. The first of these Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) is thought to be up and running by the middle of next year.

This is quite exciting and interesting although all web addresses will still need "http://" at the beggining. It is being billed as one of the biggest changes to the interenet in the last 15 years.

The Internet had its 40th Birthday yesterday.

"Of the 1.6 billion users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based," Beckstrom said at the opening of Icann's conference in Seoul, South Korea, this week. The conference approved the change today, its last day, following more than nine years of work and two years of testing.

"It's more incremental [than previous changes] but it's the single biggest change in 10 or 15 years," Beckstrom said. "It's about making the internet more global and more accessible. One world, one internet."

I think this will make browsing and learning Chinese that little bit more interesting. What are your thoughts?

- Will English people have trouble browsing the emerging populations of China & India's web presence if web addresses are in their languages?

IT Pro make an interesting point about piracy across the language barrier...

News Source : Guardian