I’ve greatly admired Google since the day my Kiwi friend Bruce Hoult suggested trying it as a replacement for an aging Alta Vista. My search behavior comes close to monogamy, although I’ve occasionally dallied with others. I predominantly used the home-town favorite, WebCrawler, for ages, then was lured by better results at Alta Vista, and finally Google. Google’s product was good, but so was their soul as far as I could tell. They rose above the grasping machinations of Redmond’s empire (and their bloated MSN portal), they were never tacky like AOL or Yahoo!; they didn’t need to play any game but doing their job well every day, and it seemed like they didn’t particularly want to. “Don’t be Evil”, said the corporate mission statement, and it wasn’t hard to believe.

Every once in a while, however, word came out that they had caved in to some stupid request from the US government to hand over search data, just like the DoJ-frightened Microsoft and the ever-clueless AOL. Somehow they managed to redeem themselves, at least to a small degree, by being a bit less accommodating then the other search engines. But it really worried me whenever I heard of their Chinese operations. When they setup shop there four years ago, they did so under an agreement to censor certain subjects on google.cn. As Victoria used to say, “We are not amused” by such things. In fact, I was disgusted and disappointed.

It’s one thing to fall in with the US government, it has to work within certain limits. It is also recently run by those that aren’t exactly mental giants, recalling a president that obviously didn’t delight in reading and left the impression that he didn’t know how. The Chinese are not limited by any legal restraint, any historical sense of decency in power, and they’re not stupid. Neither China nor the rest of the world are well served by an amoral regime that is unchecked by anyone.

Yesterday, Google announced “A new approach to China” on their official blog. Finally motivated by a series of attacks against their systems last month, Google has “decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn”. It’s a tough call whether the people of China are better off with a censored Google or none at all, in the short term. In the long term, however, it’s definitely in the interest of the people of China that their government not be allowed to pretend that it is a legitimate and mature member of the community of modern nations.

It’s a risky bet. China has gotten their way until now, and the other companies that have gone along with the statist thugs in Beijing (Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Cisco spring to mind, but there are dozens of other co-conspirators to censorship in the world’s largest country) may all decide to take advantage of Google’s absence. It won’t even slightly surprise me if they do. On the other hand, I would be delighted to learn that Ballmer is abashed at the comparative venality of coöperating and steps up to join them. Google has more to lose here than anyone else, and they’re willing to make the bet.

They’re are worse things than censorship, slavery and murder for example. But those are illegal and we don’t need anybody to take a stand against them. Censorship is profoundly evil and damaging, and we need champions to continue to highlight it. Thank you Google!