Many Americans have been up in arms today about the news that Google has agreed to censor its search results for the new Chinese “.cn” version of its search engine. The Chinese government wants results that pertain to Taiwan’s independence, Tiananmen Square massacre, and who knows what else omitted from the search engine. Google will also be excluding blogging and gmail from the services it is offering to China.

While Internet censorship is an outrage and a disgrace to democracy, it already happens every day in every country in the world. China has been censoring internet content for years at the ISP level. Censorship even happens here in the good old USA. Sites with child pornography, violence, and a whole slew of other illegal content are constantly being shut down here in the United States. Gambling sites are also illegal in the United States. I’m not arguing for or against censorship, I’m just saying that it happens everywhere all the time. There is a ton of gray area here. Who decides what content is decent and what is indecent?

Update:
Google just released this statement on their blog about this decision. They sited one of the major motivating factors being that they did it for quality control purposes since the current google.com site in China is problematic. Here is an excerpt from Google’s blog:

“Obviously, the situation in China is far different than it is in those other countries; while China has made great strides in the past decades, it remains in many ways closed. We aren’t happy about what we had to do this week, and we hope that over time everyone in the world will come to enjoy full access to information. But how is that full access most likely to be achieved? We are convinced that the Internet, and its continued development through the efforts of companies like Google, will effectively contribute to openness and prosperity in the world. Our continued engagement with China is the best (perhaps only) way for Google to help bring the tremendous benefits of universal information access to all our users there.”

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