In a surprise announcement earlier today, Google has revealed that they will be ending censorship in China. In January 2006 Google opened Google.cn to much controversy as they agreed  to censor search results. Many criticised the company deviating from it’s core value of “don’t be evil”.

The decision has been made after attacks on Google servers with their primary goal to access Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Google have announced they will start talks with the Chinese government to offer their services without any censorship.

Unfortunately, the likelihood of the Chinese government agreeing to this seems about just as likely as Google going bankrupt, though we’ll have to wait and see. It’s definitely a strong move from Google and they acknowledge in their blogpost that “this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China”.

Source: Google blog