June 25, 2009

Access to Google has been disrupted in some parts of China, amid a row over what Chinese citizens should be allowed to view over the internet.

Users reported they could not access either Google's search engine or its Chinese-language version.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang accused Google of spreading pornography and breaking Chinese law.

The move came as the US called on China to scrap its plan to put net-filtering software on all new computers.

Google said it was looking to why there was an outage.

The disruption to Google's services reported by users in Beijing and Shanghai comes a week after China accused Google of deliberately linking to "pornographic and vulgar" websites and ordered it to stop.

We have found that Google has spread a lot of pornographic content, which is a serious violation of Chinese laws and regulations," Mr Qin told reporters on Thursday.

He urged the company to abide by local rules, but said he had no specific details on the outage.

Meanwhile, the US said China's proposed internet filter would violate China's free trade obligations, weaken computer security and raise serious censorship concerns.