By Eric Auchard and Doug Young
Shanghai - Internet search giant Google will block politically sensitive terms on its new China site, bowing to conditions set by Beijing in return for access to the world's number-two Internet market.
The voluntary concessions laid out on Tuesday by Google, which is launching a China-based search site as it officially enters the market, would parallel similar self-censorship already practised there by most multinationals and domestic players.
Homegrown giants like Sohu.com and Baidu.com, along with China sites operated by Yahoo and Microsoft, all routinely block searches on politically sensitive terms such as the Falun Gong spiritual movement and Taiwan independence.
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It will stay away from email and blogging "In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on Google.cn in response to local law, regulation or policy," Andrew McLaughlin, Google's senior policy counsel, said in a statement.
"While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission."
Google, known for its "Don't do evil" mantra, is developing its China approach as it seeks to strike a balance between the freedom of information it champions and the censorship demanded by Beijing, which controls access to China's 111 million Internet users.
The company added that at least for now, it will stay away from email and blogging in China, which have been the source of recent controversies after Beijing demanded information on an email user from Yahoo, and Microsoft pulled down a politically sensitive posting from its China-based blog service.
Google said it will also stay away from chat rooms, another popular form of expression over the Internet.
'China is the most repressive censorship regime' Instead, it said it would initially offer four of its core services - website and image search, Google News and local search - while working toward introducing additional services over time.
"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," McLaughlin said.
The first glimpse at Google's new Chinese offerings comes less than a week after it resisted the US Justice Department's efforts to get information about commonly used sex search terms.
That government demand was met by Yahoo and Microsoft, spokespersons for those companies said.
"China is the most repressive censorship regime on the Internet," said John Palfrey, one of the principal investigators on a joint university research project on global Internet censorship known as the OpenNet Initiative.
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