One of the most powerful demonstrations of the difference between Google's US and chinese results can be seen through an image query for "Tiananmen square".

http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen%20square
http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen%20square

I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying the people making a big fuss about it are hypocrites.

Or maybe a country is not a monolithic entity, and it's different individuals doing the censorship in the U.S. and complaining about the censorship in China. Maybe some of these people even don't like the censorship in the U.S., but are forced to live with it?

The point I'm trying to make is that if someone feels strongly enough about censorship to make a stand, they should be making a stand where it counts. Google's censorship of Chinese search results is, in my opinion, far less important than the FCC's increasing stranglehold over American media.

It's just an opinion, and I don't like to be preachy, which is why I only posted one sentence about it. I think it's absurd for the American media to rake Google over the coals for something relatively insignificant, while saying nothing about the FCC's attempts to extend their already significant powers and gain even more of an ability to regulate and control the country's media.

I certainly don't agree with China's censorship policies, and I think it's unfortunate that Google chose to go along with them, but there are plenty of search engines other than Google and plenty of ways Chinese citizens can still gain anonymous access to information their government doesn't want them to see. Compared to my own government's increasingly blatant (and successful) attempts to circumvent my freedoms, this Google thing is a non-issue. It doesn't deserve the attention it's gotten.

Look at it from google's eyes though. Censership or not, they are now available to the chinese people. Before this, they blocked google's site all together. I'd rather have a censered search than no search at all. More accuratly, I would rather have some billion more people accessing my website than, well, not some billion more people.

Furthermore, they actually notify the user that censorship is taking place. This is huge!

So apparently the government of the Christmas Islands is responsible for the removal of goatse. Uhh, I'm not sure if this is a good thing, but how does the government of the Christmas Islands have that much power. We're talking about goatse here. A beloved intertron institution.