The principle that in order to do business in China, one must make certain compromises about freedom of expression is a well known tenet of international media companies. Take for instance Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation which has a long tradition of putting chasing the dragon ahead of freedom of expression.
Even down to the interesting detail that the current chief executive of BSkyB, Mr James Murdoch, delivered a speech to the Milken Institute in California several years ago describing the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement as a dangerous cult. For a press which regularly demonised the expedience of Murdoch condemnation was pretty easy. But now there are a set of new moral equivocators to think about. The triumvirate of new media power, Microsoft, Yahoo! and now Google, have joined News Corp in the category of businesses that would rather compromise than lose market share. Google's decision to edit its search results in exchange for permission to operate out of China may not be quite as directly repugnant as the 10 year jail sentence a dissident Chinese Yahoo! user was handed after the company released his email details to the authorities, but it does rather undermine the central premise that Google is great because it enables and doesn't edit, it is the amoral unjudgemental aggregator - which will therefore throw search results at you which are good, bad and indifferent . But there is a fascinating slightly counter cultural perspective here from Danny Sullivan at searchenginewatch.com. However, I would return to our leader line, that, whatever the marginal arguments, Google has taken a business decision which leaves many of us a bit less in love with it than we were.
