The Las Vegas Review-Journal editorializes against Google’s China ventures. Thanks to public pressure from people who haven’t quite thought things through, Google looks to be relenting on its China project. And as of this morning, it isn’t exactly clear whether or not the Chinese can access to search engine.

Should Google relent, it will represent something of a victory for grandstanding bloggers, pundits, and politicians who blew this into a big issue. But who exactly are the losers? Not Google. The tech giant is doing just fine. And certainly not the Chinese government. It will retian complete control over what Internet content it will allow Chinese people to access.

No, the losers of course, are the Chinese. Before this imbroglio, the Chinese people were going to have access to the web’s best search engine. Yes, many searches would have been censored. But — and this is important — Google would have let them know their search results were being censored. Knowing when and over what you’re being censored at least lets you know what the government is hiding from you. Not only that, but the censoring software was apparently pretty easy to navigate around — common misspellings of Tiananmen, for example, tended to sneak through.

And now? Well, now the Chinese may soon have no Google at all. Instead, they’ll use Baidu, the state-run search engine. Or they’ll use any number of foreign search engines that, like Google, also complied with the Chinese government’s demands, but escaped the ill-considered public scrutiny Google drew.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006 at 8:42 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.