China Blocks Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine, Despite Offering Censored Results

So, Bing becomes the latest service to be shut down by Chinese
government behind its so-called Great Firewall of
China^[1], which blocks thousands
of websites originating in the west including Facebook, WhatsApp^[2], Twitter, Yahoo, and
Google.

The news came as a surprise because Microsoft’s search engine
actually followed China’s strict rules on censoring search
results.

Online service WebSitePulse that tracks outages in China also
confirmed that cn.bing.com—the web address for Bing in China since
its launch in June 2009—was inaccessible in several parts of the
country.

After investigating reports from Chinese users, a Microsoft
spokesperson has “confirmed that Bing is currently inaccessible in
China” and that the company is “engaged to determine next
steps.”

Microsoft’s Bing becomes the second major search engine to ban
from China, after Google search, which left the country, along with
other Google websites in 2010, in order to avoid Chinese
censorship^[3].

However, late last year it was revealed that Google had secretly
been working on a censored version of
its search engine^[4]
to make a comeback in China, after an eight-year-long absence of
the company from the country with the world’s largest market of
internet users.

Although the apparent cause of the ban remains unknown, the ban
comes a day after China’s top search engine Baidu received complaints^[5]
that it was promoting low-quality pieces from its news organization
Baijiahao in its search engine, weighing down its shares.

State-owned telecommunications operator China Unicom confirmed
that Bing had been blocked in the country after a government order,
the Financial Times reported on
Wednesday, citing two sources familiar with the matter.
^[6]

If users attempt to access Bing in China, the browser displays in a
“connection error.” This is because the Chinese Great
Firewall has now been configured to corrupt the connection and
stop resolving the domain name associated with the banned IP
address of Bing’s China site.

To access Bing in China, users can do a little about it, because
to visit censored websites, users need to rely on VPN
services^[8], but the Chinese
government has been cracking down on the use
of VPN^[9] services in the
country.

This is not the first time China has blocked a Microsoft
service. In November 2017, the country pulled Microsoft’s Skype
Internet phone call and messaging service from Apple and Android
app stores after the company refused to comply with their local
laws.

^[7]