The scenario: Censorship as punishment
Congress awarded the Dalai Lama, and China retaliated by redirecting Google searches in China to Chinese search engine Baidu.
The irony
In January 2006, Google capitulated to Chinese requests that the company censor its own search results on Google.cn. Rights groups berated Google for the move.
Why Google may have been right
At the time, Google argued that it was doing the right thing. China wouldn’t let Google into the country without self-censorship; and, Google claimed, the freedom that Google-provided information would ultimately foster could more than justify a modicum of self-censorship
Sirgey and Larry may have been on to something. Flash-forward to 2007: Chinese Googlers, re-routed to Baidu, will see their country’s censorship machine in action.
Had Google not played by the rules on self-censorship in ’05, Chinese searchers never would have seen their freedom of search yanked from their desktops (or at least not in this way). That’s hardly Tiananmen Square fodder. But it is bound to make an impression—if only subliminally, and if only in aggregate with other freedoms Chinese people lose every day—on the part of the Chinese population who’s educated enough to search to begin with.
