internet - Google joins Chinese censor

Do no evil, might be the catch phrase of Google, they have resisted most of the pressure to follow the Chinese censor, but now also the "do-no-evil" search engine has followed the lead of Microsoft and Yahoo.
After it launched its Chinese search engine today, it was very fast obvious its searches were very biased towards governmental sites, ignoring criticasters of China, write Ireland Online (and many others).

Within minutes of the launch of the new site bearing China’s web suffix .cn, searches for the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement showed scores of sites omitted and users directed to articles condemning the group posted on Chinese government websites.
Searches for other sensitive subjects such as exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama, Taiwan independence, and terms such as “democracy” and “human rights” yielded similar results.

You do not have to be a clearvoyant to expect some discussion here. Earlier Google was already criticized for banning those websites from its news search engine that were officially blocked in China. The argument then was that internet users in China would anyway not be able to see them, a false argument, since Chinese internet users who look up foreign websites often know very well how to circumvent the IP-blocks in China.
The number of Chinese internet users is rather small as a percentage, about three percent, but since China has since last week 111 million internet users, we still talk about over three million people.
In a related event, Freezing Point, a journalism section in the China Youth Daily, has been shut down, writes the Washington Post.

Party officials summoned the senior editors of the China Youth Daily and ordered Freezing Point closed a day after distributing a five-page document that accused the section of "viciously attacking the socialist system" and condemned a recent article in it that criticized the history textbooks used in Chinese middle schools.

Chinese media have been told not to report about the ban.

The chief editor of Freezing Point, Li Datong, confirmed the suspension in a message on his blog before censors deleted the page. "My colleagues and I just finished the full-page proof of tomorrow's Freezing Point, but it looks like it can't come out," he wrote. "Freezing Point tenaciously survived for 11 years, and it has finally died."

Update: As expected, many reactions on the cowtow by Google to the Chinese censor. The New York Times signals that the Chinese edition of Google does not include its powerful Gmail or blogger.com as functions. Since Chinese users can easily go to Google.com the impact of its inhouse censoring could be limited. The Google argument that they wanted to put their servers on Chinese soil sounds odd: I never had a problem in getting to their services in China, unless they were blocked again, but then you use a proxy. No real clue why they have left their high moral grounds, unless they have other marketing plans in China.