How Google Could End Web Censorship In China In Two Easy Steps

By Tim Worstall

Or at least how a small group of activists think that Google could end web censorship in China in two easy steps. 

Here’s what the plan is and it does indeed seem very simple:
1. Google needs to first switch its China search engine (google.com.hk) to https by default. It has already done this in the US, but not in China. This would essentially mean that Chinese netizens using Google would be taken to https://www.google.com.hk, the encrypted version of the search engine. The great firewall of China cannot selectively block search results on thousands of sensitive terms if the encrypted version is used.
2. While we provide a pretty comprehensive list of websites that are blocked in China, Google holds the best list of blocked websites, everywhere in the world. If the website that a user tries to visit is blocked, Google should redirect the user to a mirrored version of the same website hosted by Google.
That’s it. 

Two simple steps and Google could end online censorship by the end of this month in China. 

Quite possibly they could end online censorship just about everywhere in the world before the new year. Forget about not doing evil – this would be something that we could all celebrate.
I’ll leave it to better technical minds than mine to check whether this would actually work or not. 

My suspicion is that it’s not quite that simple: a small group mirroring one or two sites might get away with it but I have a feeling that a major corporation flooding China with the entirety of the banned parts of the internet will find the authorities doing something or other to frustrate that attempt.