Seems weird to think that Google can 'opt out' from a country, or vice versa, but it seems that the world's largest online and the world's largest offline communities have split for good. On paper, there's something subtley communist about Google's policy of egalitarian ownership of the web, but there's nothing similar about their political views on freedom of information.
It's a tough one, trying to determine when censorship becomes restriction of people's freedom. My min tracks back to when we tried to place a keyword based adult filter on blueyonder.co.uk's search engine, which at the time was powered in part by Google's back-fill. Myself and Guy Spivack sifted through about 10,000 potentially 'adult' words to decide which ones were acceptable and which ones weren't. I have no idea what gave us the authority at the time to make that decision, but at the time we felt like we had no choice but to try and do something to stop kids from being able to see adult content on the web. Surely it's only like putting a gate at the top or bottom of the stairs, to protect kids from their own curiosity.
Is it so different from the Chinese government's perspective to want to control the political content of what people search for. Does the analogy hold? Is it just protecting people for what they believe is their own good? I can't help but doubt that altruism is their core motive, but what's for sure is that once you start to control one piece of what people see you are on a slippery slope to having to make decisions about everything they see.
Either way, the dominant search engine in China, Baidu, seems happier to oblige and so they would. Alexa recently ranked Baidu the 8th biggest site in the world. No doubt, with Google off their back, Baidu's use will only increase further. Particularly if everyone starts typing 'Google' into Baidu.
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