Not only did Google once write a letter saying "Don’t do Evil" for their prospective shareholders as they went IPO,
"Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be
better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company
that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short-term
gains."
And until yesterday on their own corporate website they also had, "We believe strongly in…. the democracy of the web.."
A page no doubt their search engines would not be able to point to in China (This information has been censored). To rectify that, this is what it has there instead.
In the years I have been following and writing about this issue, there has never been a company that’s so fun and so easy to make fun of as this. For that I probably still love google…
Yan Sham-Shackleton Online 
Hi Yan
I have two comments. Firstly, this was fairly big news item, certainly in the UK, and has brought home to many people the fact that China is still an oppressive regime. This is separate from the issues surrounding Google. I think the negative perception of China has begun to fade from people’s perceptions as the memories of Tiananmen wane and with the perception in the West that as many of our consumer goods are manufactured there, and nearly all major corporations do business there, that the situation in the country has been somehow rationalised and accepted. I think you can perhaps see this phenomenon with some people attempting to apply a kind of moral relativity to the situation in China, in the comments on this site.
The second point is that I do not know if I am alone in being slightly surprised that Google has taken this point in time as the moment to subvert its founding principles and strike a deal with the Chinese Government. Is the size of the market worth it? It was reported that Google’s revenue in China are about $150 million, against total revenue of about $3.2 billion. Even if they double their revenue is it worth the tarnished image? Users have instantly bought into other Google products because Google was perceived as being somehow different, more fun, less like a faceless amoral company. Well that just ended. If there is a silver lining to this cloud, perhaps Sergey and co have a few tricks up their sleeve.
BTW a search for your site on google.cn pulls up an entry so it obviously hasn’t been locked down tight.
LikeLike
Was the entry something like, “Rock Star Inxs?” :). Just curious what you did you plug in?
Otherwise I agree with everything you say.
yan
LikeLike
The whole shebang is deplorable for Google and pathetic for CCP. So this is how it goes, “if you cannot beat’em, join’em.” This is not going to do any good for the advance of mankind. Sounds like a foregone conclusion that the world is ruled by timid eccentric parties or pushy egoistic hawks coupled with conglomerates conveting monies. Google joining the shameful team should not be so shocking on second thought.
LikeLike
Hey Nevin, Long time no hear. Hope all is well.
yan
LikeLike
No I just put glutter.org into the chinese only section and it came back with a listing for your site. If you search on glutter then a whole bunch of stuff comes back, including some with a .cn domain.
In line with the whole anti google backlash, check out this portent of the future: http://epic.lightover.com/ so Gibsonesque it made my skin crawl.
LikeLike
Why don’t we just ask google to squirt-out an index of items it removes from google.cn search results on the fly? That way those of us in “non-filtered” locales would be able to check out google-blocked results.
This is probably a trivial excercise to accomplish for the code monkeys at google. They could set up a php server to return a snapshot of their last hour, half hour, ten minutes, minute queries with links to lists of both returned and excised results.
Do No Evil?
Well, maybe doing something like this could help redeem them…
Just a suggestion.
BTW, Nice Pic in the BBC “Chinese Bloggers Debate” piece, Yan.
Cheers,
-dcm
LikeLike