Google announced today that it will shift its search engine off the mainland but will not close doors completely. Google and China have had an on-going dispute over recent months regarding restricting search results. There had been talks that Google would pull out completely from the Chinese market, however has decided to remain most likely due to its desire to profit from an explosively growing market.

According to the Associated Press, effective this afternoon, visitors to Google.cn are being redirected to Google’s Chinese language service based in Hong Kong. Results on these pages are not censored by Google, but the Chinese government filters can still restrict results that are viewed by mainland audiences.

Google originally set up a search engine in China in 2006. Currently about 700 or Google’s 20,000 employees are in China.

If you have turned on the national news in the last week, there is talk about what is going on in Iran. Unfortunately, there is a lot of uproar going on, and there is some finger pointing going on with internet companies and their involvement. Internetnews.com is reporting,”Internet traffic experts and DPI firms have been hard at work assessing the traffic into and out of Iran, but such data only provides a certain level of insight into the motives and actions of the government of Iran. Experts believe that specific applications are being targeted, but cannot prove that the government is using a specific technology such as DPI. ” This opens up questions of how much should a government be able to interfere with it’s residence with their use of the internet. Are sites such as Twitter that powerful that there needs to be intervention? Technology is powerful, however is it really that powerful to affect results of Iran’s political affairs?