Interesting essay by Clive Thompsonin this weekend's NYT Magazine: Google's China Problem (and China's Google Problem) - New York Times In China, the censorship regime is not only a political tool; it is also a competitive one — a cudgel that private firms use to beat one another with. If the Internet is bringing a revolution to China, it is experienced mostly as one of self-actualization: empowerment in a thousand tiny, everyday ways.

One observation I found interesting: the notion that search results could serve as forming or confirming a world view. If one searches on "falun dafa" and only receive results that condemn the group, what basis do you have to have any other view of the group. It's easy to condemn Google and China for censoring content, but there are calls for that every day here in the U.S. No one seems to object that Yahoo! and Google block results referencing the Nazis or fascism in France and Germany. In the U.S., the list of objectionable content we need to magically protect people (usually children) from grows every day. I don't know what the right answer is, but it seems that through history every attempt to blind a society to things foreign or objectionable to that society, eventually results in that society's downfall, not preservation.