Tim Bray (of SUN) writes:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/10/23/Missing-in-Shanghai

Wikipedia. BBC News. YouTube. Everyone on wordpress.com and on blogspot.com. Plus, all feeds hosted at FeedBurner (and that’s a lot of feeds, including some pretty big-name bloggers). Mind you, all this changes, sometimes from week to week, they tell me. Still, you have to feel sorry for Chinese knowledge workers, fighting with one hand tied behind their back.

Google's self-proclaimed strategy in cases like these is to compromise in order to not lose out providing information to one fifth of the world's population. So their self-proclaimed tactic would now be to self-censor Feedburner feeds, and e.g. only publish those which don't contain sensitive keywords (Mao, Tiananmen Square, Falun Gong, Human Rights). Same for Blogspot, YouTube etc.

I wonder if Google considers it a different level of censorship?

Leaving entries out of a search result directory could* be thought of as less censorship than blocking delivery of content created by your users (Eg. YouTube / BlogSpot).

I suppose one could argue that by leaving out search results you're not preventing end-users *access* to these sites, you're just not providing the link. If they blocked YouTube or BlogSpot content they're actually blocking access to that content.

(*I don't necessarily agree with this)

I agree it's a different level. Though they also did it before with their satellite content... the satellite view is "missing" in Google Maps China. So in that case as they are the content provider of the satellite view they're also blocking access to that content (unless you go to the international Google Maps). Or perhaps one can think of as the satellite view as also just a "search result" for the land itself, which is still accessible, which Google doesn't block, which you can still walk...?

I think their basic argument is checking whether a small compromise will benefit a fifth of the world, as they put it. That is very dangerous thinking in theory, e.g. maybe one decides that handing over a single user to the Chinese gov't is better than having to shut down your search engine for a "fifth of the world's population." (Which single person is that important to be able to weigh against a billion other people?) In practice, I don't think they follow this argument through though (not yet anyway), so there's still something between e.g. handing over a Chinese user. I just don't think it's their self-proclaimed standard that's between it.