BEIJING, Jan 25, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Microsoft is still trying to figure out
why its Bing search engine temporarily went offline in China, the company’s
president said following speculation that it could have been blocked by
censors.
The US firm’s Chinese website, cn.bing.com, was accessible again late
Thursday, one day after it suddenly went offline, temporarily taking away the
most prominent foreign search engine in China.
The disruption raised fears among social media users that it was the latest
foreign website to be blocked by China. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter
have long been blocked by authorities using a censorship apparatus known as
the “Great Firewall”.
“This is not the first time it’s happened. It happens periodically,”
Microsoft president Brad Smith told Fox Business News at the World Economic
Forum in Davos.
“There are times when there are disagreements, there are times when there
are difficult negotiations with the Chinese government, and we’re still
waiting to find out what this situation is about,” he said.
Bing’s temporary disruption came as a surprise because the search engine
has followed China’s censorship rules.
On Thursday, for example, a Bing search for Liu Xiaobo, the dissident and
Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died of cancer while still in custody last
year, returned one message: “Results are removed in response to a notice of
local law requirement.”
Smith said it was understood that Bing did not have the same legal freedoms
in China that it enjoyed in other countries.
“But at the same time, we stick to our guns. There are certain principles
that we think it’s important to stand up for, and we’ll go at times into the
negotiating room and the negotiations are sometimes pretty darn direct,” he
said.
While its rival Google shut down its search engine in China in 2010 after
rows over censorship and hacking, Bing has continued to operate in the
country, along with Microsoft-owned Skype.
Bing, however, has struggled to catch up to China’s own Baidu search
engine, which dominates the market even though many people in the country
complain about the quality of its search results.
Smith said Microsoft took seriously its obligations to customers regarding
censorship.
“I think what is interesting today is technology and sort of human rights,
free expression, these issues are really intersecting and on certain days
colliding more than in the past,” he said.
“There’s deals that we’ve turned down for things like facial recognition
technology because we felt that people’s rights will be put at risk.
“And I think more than ever, tech companies really need to think about
these things, they need to be principled and you have to have a little moral
courage, in my view, if you’re going to be in this business and really take
care of your customers.”