Quite an uproar over Google’s agreement to censor results in their Chinese search portal (I’d link to it, but I can’t find any official Google press release or statement, just thousands of duplicate AP stories– does anyone know where the source is?). Where were the dissenting voices when Yahoo and Microsoft agreed to the same conditions? I’ll say the same thing about this as I did the (irrational) praise Google was receiving for refusing to turn over search records to the Department of Justice: it’s all about the money.

In the DoJ instance, Google sees a nice way to look good at no cost to themselves. Ultimately, I think they’ll turn the information over, sensibly stripped of potentially personally identifying data.

The Chinese decision is even simpler: Baidu is threatening Google in a huge market that is going to grow astronomically over the next few years. Relying on the “Great Chinese Firewall” results in Google services becoming essentially unavailable to most Chinese users– and a loss of all that revenue.

I admire Google and I think they are generally going in the right direction most of the time… but this particular instance is all business. They have no leverage here (denying the request and having no portal will do nothing in the effort to democratize China), so it’s hard to get worked up about the morality. I’d like the think that the folks at Google suspect– as I do– that this will ultimately work in the favor of democracy anyway, because there’s nothing more threatening to a communist regime than its populace becoming aware of what it doesn’t and cannot have. I don’t think the real issue here is about finding prohibited contents, but about the fear the Chinese government must have that their populace will really start talking to each other– and a on a large scale. If there’s something to be worked up about here, it’s about the fact that the Blogger service isn’t available in the Google China portal… that would be something.

But the results are interesting. Compare the US search for Tiananmen Square with the same Chinese search. However, before you gloat, search for Xenu in the US Google — see that note at the bottom? Now search in Google China. Interesting, no? And I don’t mean that the DMCA exclusion in the US search is only partially working, but that it doesn’t exist in the Chinese search.

[ruminate, google, china, free speech]