Dont bother searching for Tianenmen Square

As I drove across San Francisco Bay this morning, I heard via NPR the news about Google joining the ranks of MSN and Yahoo, caving to pressure from the fascist Chinese government to support censorship:

[from Version of Google in China Won’t Offer E-Mail or Blogs - New York Times by David Barboza]

In an effort to cope with China’s increasingly pervasive Internet controls, Google said Tuesday that it would introduce a search engine here this week that excludes e-mail messaging and the ability to create blogs. 

Google officials said the new search engine, Google.cn, was created partly as a way to avoid potential legal conflicts with the Chinese government, which has become much more sophisticated at policing and monitoring material appearing on the Internet.

Web sites have exploded in popularity in a country eager for freer flow of information. But Web portals and search engines trying to win Chinese users face a significant balancing act: they do not want to flout government rules and guidelines that restrict the spread of sensitive content, but they want to attract users with interesting content.

One result has been that search engines and Web portals have censored their sites and cooperated with Chinese authorities. Indeed, the move to create a new site comes after Google itself, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft, have come under scrutiny over the last few years for cooperating with the Chinese government to censor or block online content.

We should ostracize from the world community those governments who don’t want to allow basic human rights for their citizens. But players like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are afraid of losing market share, so they go along with repression. This is a black day. Google is not on the side of the angels in this.

I expect that overly pragmatic fatalists will tell me that I am being too idealistic, that Google is merely bowing to the inevitable, that China is a sovereign country, blah blah, woof woof. But I just don’t care. It’s wrong, and going along with it for money is simply appeasing the Chinese. If we are willing to threaten sanctions against Iran — they are a sovereign country aren’t they? — why can’t we do the same with China? Low-cost underwear? Or are we just so jaded that we don’t care?