Google declines to talk to Congress about censoring search results in China

Mountain View (CA) - Developing Story : Google apparently has decided to not provide members of the US Congress with any further information about its business engagement in China. According to a report of the San Francisco Chronicle, the company has declined a request declined to appear before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on Wednesday.

The newspaper quoted Ryan Keating, a spokesman for Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who plans to chair the meeting. Besides Google, Microsoft and Cisco have also declined to attend the conference. Yahoo has yet to respond to the invite, according to Keating.

Google’s decision to pad its market entry into China with censored search results has led to a wave of criticism from governments as well human rights organizations. Google, in turn, maintains that most of the content accessed by the search engine would have anyway been blocked in the Chinese market.

How the censorship of Google.cn looks like was recently shown by SearchEngineWatch with an example image search.