I guess I can't help but be a bit disappointed when an entity that purports to be moral ("do no evil") turns out to be otherwise. Oh well.

Excellent quote.  But amoral is not Immoral.  Amoral is without morals and that they are.  But yes, we do try to personify companies and project our morals on them.  It seldom works.

12# Right on, Jafo....now that's calling a spade a spade.
Google makes the so- called 'evil empire' look like saints

And people think the sun shines out of Google's arse...

Not me, not now, not ever! Don't trust Google and have none of their products/services on my machine....which has me curious as to why I get a "connecting to Google diagnostics" dialogue flashing on my progress bar when experiencing timeouts and/or server errors when logged on to WC (only page open) and trying to change pages, etc? Something's not right there...Google has never been invited into my machine, yet its diagnostics dept is connecting me to them.

So....

Now...to keep the Commies happy......Tienamin Square will NOT have happened...cos Google won't give the links.....

One day...when omnipotence becomes all-consuming....it 'may' become expedient to keep the Japanese happy...at the expense of a few old idiots who remember WW2....and determine [via censorship....sorry...selective linking] that Pearl Harbour was NOT an unprovoked attack.

I can hear the faint bleatings of outrage at that one.....

Suckers, one and all.

That will never happen Jafo. America never forgets such things.

If the penalty for doing what's right is being required to close up shop, then a moral person has to close up shop. If there was something morally wrong about Chinese car specifications (I don't know, maybe the shock absorbers have to be made out of dead kittens), then I would expect companies to simply refuse to make cars for the Chinese market.

You have to do better than that. China didn't insist that google harm anyone or anything, they only insisted that some content not be included in searches. To tell you the truth, I'd love it if I could do a search for (say) "Blow Guns" without getting 100,000 hits for porn for every 1 hit on Blow Guns.

((((But no, I wouldn't support the U.S. Government mandating anything to make that happen).

How dare the government of China insist companies follow their laws when doing business in their country

Yes, how dare they start behaving like Americans...

Banning "freedom" and "human rights" from people's vocabulary is harmful.

Banning "freedom" and "human rights" from people's vocabulary is harmful.

Yes, and thank god we still have laws against that. As does most of the world. Sadly, china has not matured that much yet.

Google is a public company. They have to make money. To not do business with China would simply be foolish.

So many people here seem to be anti-business, and anti-government at the same time. I don't get it.

Google betrays own philosohy? That's surely not the case....Google's philosophy is to achieve global internet domination and to make as much money as it possibly can, regardless of the source. Seems they're right on track to me....entering China on China's terms for now, but they'll find ways to slip under the Chinese radar, you can bet on it.

People say every company is trying to take over the world. Microsoft was trying to take over, Yahoo, IBM. Wikipedia is trying to take over information. Dell is trying to take over the computer market. Ford and GM are trying to buy all the car companies and take over. Same with record labels, and food companies and prescription drugs and just about everything else.

It's just business. It's not pretty, but they have to do what they have to do.

I have a feeling Google won't try very hard to censor itself. Some 'illegal' information will slip through, and nobody will care.

Here's another interesting take on the subject:

Link

"It is also significant because the Google page will let people know if their search results are being restricted, something that doesn't happen if the filtering is done by the government."

I think when people see how much censorship is going on, they won't take it lightly. I'm not saying Google will cause a revolution, but it will create some awareness.

When I did use Google search, which was some time ago now, I frequently encountered the problem of search results being loaded with too much totally unreated crap that was of no interest or relevance to me.
In a sense, that is censorship in reverse....showing me crap I don't wanna see, rather than crap they say I can't. So if, say, I do a specific search on cameras, and the return displays such items as TV's Hi fi's and electric shavers, who is paying for or taking backhanders to include non-requested information.
For example: I was interested in an Australian identity known as Dick Smith, who opened a chain of electrical stores, went into foodstuffs production and became the chairman for a civil aviation authority, etc, etc. All I typed into the search box was his name, yet the search results came back, not only with links related to Dick Smith, but also with numerous results linking directly to porn sites. NOT GOOD

Fox in the henhouse alright!