Wow, that's very good. One must remember that the common good is the good of *everyone*. A society of 100 million which is perfect in every way, but gains the perfection from the abuse of a single child in the name of the "common good" is not a moral society. Google, good ends do not justify fudging your morals to get there.

Once you distrust Google because you know they censor abroad how can you know that they do not censor anywhere else if they are asked to? Once you are not sure what was censored and where how can you tell that all other results remain uncensored?

How about stories like that then?:
http://argentina.indymedia.org/news/2006/01/369692.php

There is a saying for children in Germany that says "if you lie once people won't believe you next time".

To continue the German saying (I had to think of it too!).... "... even if you are telling the truth at one time."

And that's what i've send to Google (http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py):

Dear Google,

Here is Ludwik from Warsaw, Poland. Forgive me for my poor English,
but when Poland was under Soviet occupation we couldn't learn English
in our schools.

I just want you to know what I think about you censoring search
results in China. You are evil. You start to mess with freedom of
speech and I feel I can't trust you anymore.
What you are doing is a huge evilness because it's stands against
human rights. Why do you think that your uptime is more important than
the truth or freedom of speech? Maybe your service was down a lot of
time, but at least when you were up you were source of truth and
reliable information. Now you are up 100% of time. But... what for?

I remember when you were starting services such as Gmail or Search
History some people worried about privacy issues. They didn't want any
company to has all their e-mail messages or search queries. But I
thought "You can trust those Google guys. They are different. They
cares". I don't think that anymore.

I don't feel save with all my e-mails on your web servers. I can't
trust you and I think non of us trust you the way we did before.

Ludwik, thanks for reprinting. It's interesting. You can also add this here:
http://googlecensorship.blogspot.com/2006/01/dont-be-evil.html

There are so many real problems in the world. You could actually make a difference if you would focus about a tenth of your energy on something worthwhile. Google is not the government. The employees of Google are allowed to make whatever decisions they want. As such a reputable corporation, I am sure the decision was based on logical reason.

Google's logical reason? Boils down to one word: money.

Brandon, as the number one source of information world wide, Google is more important than any government by itsself. This problem IS real, it is so real it makes me feel very uncomfortable.