The Effects of China Blocking Google

Shares in Google fell $8.34 or 1.72% to 476.65 after the bell in New York in extended after-hours trading, although investors remained uncertain as to why the latest denial service had been put in place. Shares in Baidu, which has a 70% share in China to Google's 24%, were up 2%.

Earlier this month, Google appeared to have secured its place behind the "Great Firewall of China" after months of uncertainty when it struck a deal to allow it to continue it search business, stopping the automatic reroute to Hong Kong. User who tried to log in to Google.cn were automatically redirected to its Hong Kong page.

Analysts estimate China accounted for as little as $300m of Google's annual revenue of $24bn last year. Google's dominant position on the global search market was shown to have suffered slightly, with Strategy Analytics reporting that Google's market share fell to 69.7% in the three months to the end of June, from 71.1% in the prior quarter.

Source: http://bit.ly/9z7B3O

China Blocking Google

According to BBC News, September 2, 2002, China had blocked access to the famous search engine, Google. China maintained tight controls on the internet, blocking several foreign news sites and frequently forcing demostic sites to remove controversial material.

Beijing is determined to keep strict controls on the flow of information to its own citizens. Human rights activists say more than 30,000 people are employed to keep an eye on websites, chat rooms and private e-mail messages.

Some 150,000 unlicensed internet cafes nationwide have been closed in recent months and those remaining have had to install software that prevents access to up to 500,000 banned sites. Read more.

Shocking isn't it?

What is Internet Censorship?

Hi, my friend Martin had introduced 5 different types of censorship in previous post. But, there is a new type of censorship that we called as internet censorship which has appeared recently and that is the topic that we are focusing on. First of all, we need to know what is the definition of internet censorship. Internet censorship is control or suppression of the publishing or accessing of information on the internet.

The censorship of internet is a big arguement today in the world of computer technology. The government is trying to control something especially on freedom of speech. As in all media people are allowed to speak freely and do what they wanted to do. However, government is trying to take something away that they has no right to do so.

The advancement of the technology as there is an increase in a great number of internet users. Government had tried to solve this issue by filter and banned some of the websites. Google has become one of the famous victim for internet censorship. In 2010, Google has announced that they are withdrawing themselves from the mainland China and it was a big shock for most people around the world. Google has refused to censor their search engine and lead to the end of Google in China. Besides Google, China also banned other famous websites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Life without internet is like living in a four walls but can you guys imagine internet without Facebook and Google?

Source:http://bit.ly/94hqst

Types of Censorship

In this post, we would elaborate more on types of censorship. As Kwan Hui said in the previous post, there are five types of censorship.

Moral
This type of censorship refers to issues in which moral issues are contained. Those in charge of censoring the material may find questionable content that they do not wish their audiences to observe and would wish to withhold those sorts of ideas. An example of such would be pornography or nudity in film.

Military
The act of military censorship is to withold tactics and national information from other nations and enemies. Another way that the military is censored is by preventing disturbing images or videos of war time scenarios available to the public.

Political
This occurs when the government needs to keep secrets from its civilians in order to prevent an uprising or disruption. Democracies such as ours are not too approving of this type of censorship, but have been seen to show it in the past. An example of this could be the watergate scandal, which was witheld from public view in order to prevent the demoralization of the government, and provide a "weakness" for enemies to exploit.

Religious
This is shown when one religion sees questionable material and has it removed. It is often used by one religion to make another seem of a lesser value, as a form of competition. One religion may dissaprove of the ideas of another religion in order to be more accurate with their specific faith.

Corporate

This occurs when a corporation sees that material that is unfitting to them or their business partners. It is a good tactic in keeping their reputation respectable. Also, in light of the news, the business may wish to keep certain information private, in order to increase the customer numbers.

Source: http://bit.ly/abDWRR

What is Censorship?

Guys, you do know what is censorship? Censorship is the control of the information and ideas circulated within a society. Censorship can be achieved through the examination of books, plays, films, television and radio programs, news reports and other forms of communication for the purpose of altering or suppressing ideas found to be objectionable or offensive.

The rationale for censorship have varied, with some censors targeting material deemed to be indecent or obscene; heretical or blasphemous; or seditious or treasonous. Therefore, ideas have been suppressed under the guise of protecting three basic social institutions which are the family, the church and the state.

Censorship is divided into a few categories and they are:
1. Moral
2. Military
3. Political
4. Religious
5. Corporate

On a different level, the actions and reactions of large corporations to the Internet has to be factored into any discussion of economic censorship. Some firms have paid search engine companies for preferential placement in particular subject categories when a user submits an online search inquiry. Is the information tainted because someone has paid for it to be "found," or should the standard be that so long as all responsive information is displayed to the user, placement is irrelevant?

Some governments have used a powerful array of techniques and arguments to marshal support for their censorship efforts in order to protect the national security. The curious reader is urged to read far and wide in the classic texts to see that the problem of governments and citizens reacting in this way is not a new one. What is new are the potential global consequences.

In the next post, we would explain more further on the types of censorship. Stay tuned.

Source: http://bit.ly/dz39cK

Getting Started

Due to indecisiveness on which topic to research on, finally we made up our minds. Thanks to Mr. Rodney for guiding and giving us few ideas to think of. The topic that we are going to do is about censorship. But we would only focus on certain area of censorship such as internet censorship, the effect of censorship on internet business and etc. Heard it before or not, it doesn't matter because my partner, Kwan Hui will explain it further in the next post. Stay tuned!

Week 3

Please do let us know if:

* you have modified your blog address,
* you have changed your email address,
* we don't put your blog address on our page or something.

Thanks in advance. Cheers!

Hello HBM370!

Just wanna drop by to say hello to everybody. First of all, we would like to introduce ourselves. Martin Lau and Chieng Kwan Hui. Both of us are final semester students as Martin is doing Multimedia (Business Marketing) and Kwan Hui is studying Accounting. We're fanatic football fans so that's all for now. Stay tuned and have fun throughout this semester. Cheers!