Jike: China Gets a Way to Control What Is Findable
June 23, 2011
Governments are going to have to get control of information flow or face the sort of issues that are now popping up on cable TV news. Nothing is quite as nifty as a “real” journalist standing in the midst of the disgruntled in Ireland, Greece, Libya, and Syria.
China understands this basic fact: electronic information can work just like a hot flame under a wok filled with sesame oil. Solution: turn off the flame or control it. Thinq_ reveals that “China Launches State-Approved Search Engine.” Are we surprised?
The state controlled search engine is called Jike, and is an arm of the People’s Daily, the communist party’s newspaper. Support for the move comes from some unlikely sources:
According to a report in a Wall Street Journal blog, executives from web portal Sohu, English language news outlet Sina and China’s current search engine leader Baidu all turned up to ‘offer their support’. We’re not entirely sure what incentives the execs were given in order to make them show up, but they seem to have been rather persuasive.
Indeed. I wonder whether sticks or carrots were used.
Jike enters a field already dominated by Google and Baidu, who have both struggled with government censorship in China. Will the next step be the complete exclusion of non-approved search engines?
It certainly looks like the government is well on its way to implementing permanent filtering of the Internet. I can think of some tough questins to ask; for example, “Will this clamp down occur if agitation occurs in other countries?” I won’t attempt to answer this question. A better one is, “When will social media be subject to both filtering and more forceful action?” My thought is, “Soon.”
Cynthia Murrell June 23, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search.
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