Mainland Chinese people seek to find sometimes scrambled foreign-language translations will be out of luck, as Google announced over the weekend that it was retiring one of the few digital services it offered in the country.
Users on Reddit first noticed service was down late Friday. Attempts to access Google Ttranslated from the old mainland china address is now redirected to the Hong Kong site. Bloomberg noted that the Hong Kong version of the site cannot be accessed on the mainland without a VPN, marking Google’s decision as an effective shutdown of the service.
Google made its translation feature available in China in 2017, including a separate app that people in China could download.
Google did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment, but the company confirmed with multiple outlets that it had discontinued service in China “due to low usage.” Tech Crunchwho originally reported on the news on Friday, noted that the hubbub surrounding the The upcoming National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which would mark the third term of the country’s President Xi Jingping, may have something to do with Google’s decision-making. Google China only has one less than 2% of online search cake in the country, according to Investopedia.
The American company has struggled to gain a foothold in China, not only because of market dominance by Baidu and Alibaba, but also because Google was stuck in the weeds of the Beijing government’s censorship policies. The search giant would have suffered from state sponsored hacks who undermined the company of its intellectual property and invaded Gmail addresses of human rights activists. In 2010, Google revealed that it no longer bow down to China’s censorship demands.
JThis declared policy could only last for a time. In 2018, reports showed that Google planned to create a version of its search engine, code name Dragonflyit would prevent Chinese citizens from seeing content that their government did not want to see. Google has received a lot of criticism from freedom of expression advocatesespecially because around the same time, China heavily censored any information about brutal repression in Tibet. dragonfly leads to skirmishes within Googleand eventually the company scrapped its stimulus plans in China, according to a 2018 report from The Intercept.
Google subsequently has struggled to maintain a presence in the Chinese market while balancing calls for corporate resistance censorship. Google, along with other big tech companies, refused to transmit user data to Hong Kong cops once China took over island under his control. In April this year, Google censorship Hong Kong’s new CEO John Lee’s YouTube channel about US sanctions. The United States said Lee was instrumental in cracking down on free speech in Hong Kong.