China google and censorship

It's really unfortunate that it is the name "google' that is showing up in all the headlines in connection to Chinese censorship.... because the only reason it is news is that it is strikingly*different* from the way that google normally behaves.Microsoft and Yahoo for example had already caved in (if thats the word for it) months ago to the Chinese demands for censoring chineselanguage search engines, and some of the collusion on the part of Yahoo China and companies like Cisco is really quite shocking for example.

But none of this makes the global (non-tech) news because the techindustry expects MS and Yahoo to be 'evil'. (Ie dog bites man insteadof man bites dog).

Apparently, Yahoo mail, at the request of Hong Kong officials trawled through their email records and fingered a dissident who was laterthrown into jail for a 10 year plus sentence (or something like that) and Cisco along with other US companies was largely responsible forbuilding the 'great firewall of china'.

What's particularly scary about this is that once they know how to do that stuff, then they can, of course, turn around and give it to US and/or European authorities easily and without too much fuss.Particularly scary is that the Patriot act gives the feds the right tobasically march up to every ISP in the coutnry and install special'black boxes' done God only knows what and the ISP's cannot evenmention this fact puiblically let alone not comply.Google on the other hand recently refused to comply to a DOJ request to turn over, basically *all* their search queries as well asthe multi-billion page database built up by their web crawler.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with *protecting childrenfrom pornography* (and even less with, what is wrongly described in multiple locations as being about "child pornography" when in fact the law in question is about minors getting acccess to Pornography).

In fact this is about neither child porn nor children accessing porn. No, this is about the DOJ getting access to the core of Google\'s network. Lets think this through a bit. There is no way, of course, that the DOJ is asking Google to print out all the data on a hundred million pages of paper and deliver the whole lot via the some huge Berlin airlift operation into Washington.

No, not at all, this is about getting DOJ servers right into the center of the Google data center, so they can run any type ofquery and leverage the awesome power of the google data centre to whatever ends.

Critically, Microsoft and Yahoo as well as the other search engines, quietly complied to similar DOJ requests weeks (months?) ago, but nobody wrote frontpage stories about that.

In fact you have to wonder. Is it a pure coincidence that Google finds itself having its reputation ruined over this China censorship thing only a week or so after they refuse to comply with the DOJ. I guess one has to believe so, but, big picture wise this was a helluva bad call on the part of Google. Certainly I don't agree with providing censored results (even if it is supposedly a better compromise than no results at all - remember Munich!) No. Google should never have considered that question in isolation. Because they have put themselves in a position of ruining their reputation for 'doing no evil' just when they need it most for the upcoming battle with the DOJ.