China redirects: Could my ISP do the same?
The big news in the blogosphere this afternoon seems to be Chinese surfers being redirected from the US search engines to Baidu, with many suggesting that it is a reaction to George Bush recognising the Dalai Lama. Whilst the blogosphere is unsurprisingly outraged, personally I quite like the idea of having my ISP stopping me going to Google.
We all have certain URLs we type into the address bar automatically. If I am searching for something I find myself typing 'google.com' without a thought for Ask, MSN, Yahoo, or any of the thousand other search engines available. If I am momentarily at a loss as to what to do next I find myself returning to my emails for the umpteenth time, or checking my bloglines for the zillionth time. If my ISP forced me to use another search engine every now and again, or forced me to have reasonable periods of time elapse before returning to the same web site again and again, I am sure I would utilise the web much more productively.
Yes, I know, civil liberties, blah blah blah...I'm just saying that there is an up side.
Labels: Baidu, China, Dalai Lama, George Bush, Google, search engine
1 Comments:
a friend of mine lives in China, will be for a year, and he talks about these odd government-enforced internet filters... one day, literally, youtube will be open, the next day, it will be blocked. One day he will be able to make comments on blogs, but most days he is unable to. They go back and forth, I guess depending on their leader's mood of the day.
24 October 2007 at 19:13
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