FWIW - from Motley Fool
Debunking the Bunk
You Can't Spell 'Do No Evil' Without Devil
By Rick Aristotle Munarriz
Look up the word "two-faced" in the popular Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) search engine and you will be treated to everything from the chronicles of a legendary sprint bike rider to a 1941 Greta Garbo flick. You won't find Google there, but maybe you should. Last week, the company agreed to censor its website in China. References to things like the Tianenmen Square massacre of 1989 would be left out of the results pages if Chinese residents were searching for answers on the Google.cn domain.
Google kowtowing to the Chinese government strikes a completely different tone than that set closer to home when Google recently refused to honor a subpoena request as this country's Department of Justice searched for a week's worth of search threads related to certain sites.
How can this be? How can Google side with the government in China but back the casual Internet user stateside? It's a contradiction. It's hypocritical. It's good business.
Yes, it's a shameful Faustian bargain that Google had to broker in China, but it was the only way that the politically staunch nation would accept the fast-growing search engine as a social import. China has 1.3 billion residents, four times the citizenry of the United States, and having the government block local access to Google would be devastating.
It wouldn't have been a blow to Google in the near term. Less than 10% of the country is online and the pitiful per capita income translates into a pauper's pittance when it comes to generating online advertising revenue. However, it won't always be that way. Playing hardball with China would have been like the hunger striking protesters that were killed in Tianenmen Square. Taking a stand would have been a noble thing to do. Lord knows it would have been the right thing to do. But in the end, had it held its defiant ground, it too would have been relegated to a censored footnote in the thriving Chinese search engines.
The company that aspires to live by the "do no evil" mantra had to sell its soul to get its foot in the door and over the Great Wall. It stings, but the alternative was to protest from the outside with an unstamped passport. It could have fought on principle, but its actions would have gone unheard within the already censored nation. Let's give history a chance to vindicate Google's actions in China. Some pretty amazing things can happen once you're on the inside. Today the shoehorn. Tomorrow the steel-tip boot.
That is certainly not the same situation that Google finds itself here, where ratting out its user base for the sake of a government study could have some serious ramifications. Trust and credibility can't be easily restored once torched. This doesn't mean that Google will prevail in its legal scuffle. It may very well have to hand over its records once all is said and done. However, by kicking and fighting every step of the way, it allows Google to come out of this as a defender of the people.
Google's actions are simply a company doing what it takes in the two countries with the largest Internet user populations to make sure that it continues to grow in each one. So maybe it's a contradiction. Perhaps it's hypocritical. But it's still good business.
