“China is the most repressive censorship regime on the Internet.”

This is a quote from John Palfrey who is working on a research project on global internet censorship.

This quote comes in context of Google announcing they will censor sensitive terms in China. They will be removing thousands of sites from the Google.cn listings according to what the high-ups in Beijing decide. Right now it seems most are political sites.

Also Google announced that in addition to a censored web search, they would also offer image search, Google News, and local search. Initially, Google will not offer it’s other products:

“Other products — such as Gmail and Blogger — will be introduced only when we are comfortable that we can do so in a way that strikes a proper balance among our commitments to satisfy users’ interests, expand access to information, and respond to local conditions,” said Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s senior policy counsel.

So the popular blogger.com site won’t be accessed from China anymore? Sounds like from China you can’t create a blog on blogger.com, but blogs will be indexed as long as they are not on the search black list. At least that’s how I read it.

More from Andy Beal and many others.

UPDATE: Google responds on their official blog.