For Now, An Uncensored Portal for China

If you’ve been bummed about both Yahoo and Google helping China censor their Chinese-language internet portals, there’s good news (via Rebecca MacKinnon):  AOL has launched its own Chinese-language portal. Rebecca reports:

I can confirm: the search engine on this portal is uncensored. Searches for “Falun Gong” and “Tiananmen Square Massacre” turn up the full range of results from dissident and human rights websites. I can also report that according to my friends in China, so far the AOL Chinese portal is not blocked from within the People’s Republic. Yet.

The timing is certainly interesting, just before Congress calls U.S. tech firms to The Hill explain themselves.  Let’s hope the marketplace rewards AOL richly.