China blocks Google over porn, again

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Some Google websites, including the popular search engine, were blocked by Chinese authorities today as Beijing expressed unhappiness with Google serving up porn in its search results.

The issue has long been a contentious one between the company and the country. Google said last week that it would block pornography on its Google.cn site, but Chinese censors said porn was still accessible through Google.com.

The outage may have been short-lived as some reports on the Internet show that spotty access to the sites returned shortly after 8 a.m. Pacific time.

YouTube, the video-sharing site owned by Google, has been blocked in China since March. China also blocked Twitter and some other Internet services before the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown this month.

TechCrunch reports that services affected today include Gmail, Google Apps, Google Reader, Google Books, Google Talk and Image Search.

According to the Associated Press, China has the world’s largest population of Internet users, more than 298 million, as well as the world’s most extensive system of Web monitoring and censorship.

-- Dan Fost