...and may you live in interesting times. Its unsurprising decision to acquiesce to government mandated censorship in its Chinese language site appears to mark the completion of a watershed transition for Google: from being the darling of the digirati and bien pensant, into bete noire. Somewhere along the line the cuddly little non-portal grew up to be a big, public, capitalist success. Can't have that, should be a publicly regulated utility. Having been inside a similarly positioned company, Apple, as it was periodically trashed as "selling out" for the indecent act of creating computers that businesses wanted to buy, I'm well equipped to view this hyperventilating with some mix of indifference and scorn.
To be sure, Larry Page more or less stuck out his chin and said "Hit me" with the "Don't be evil" thing. We can't even seem to agree that feeding people into shredders is evil, let alone turn that word into a commonly understood bright line for corporate behavior. What Page created was a shining mirror for projection by the perennially outraged, for whom 'evil' is whatever behavior offends their sensibilities but appears to benefit a corporate bottom line.
And they are out, in force. Not that they aren't entitled to their opinions. They just shouldn't be taken seriously until they propose an alternative. AdSense boycotts and pathetic Google-bombs don't count. They won't change the facts of life for Google or for Chinese citizens, no matter how good they make their proponents feel.
Here's a specific suggestion. Over here is a perfectly good, scalable, open source search engine. It's not available in Chinese, that I know of. Over here, are a bunch of international bloggers, some with relevant motivations and language skills, being either coders or with connections to coders. A possibility suggests itself. Nutch may not be Google, but then it wouldn't have to organize all the world's information, only that part the Chinese government thinks is evil. Nonetheless, as I've noted before, an index is a process, and someone will have to defend that index against the attacks that will occur if it's successful. That means people and money. A business model might have to wait, but here is someone with money, whose rationale might just align with this project. So, will someone put up?
