isn’t google also being evil in similar ways?

Similar, but with one distinction: Google doesn’t operate services in China that involve the sort of information the Chinese government has gotten out of Yahoo with ease, like mail. At least, that’s my understanding of the situation from the last research I did.

I don’t like Google’s “go along with Chinese censorship” policy, but as I noted previously when I blogged about this, it’s in a different league from Yahoo’s behavior:

I’ve known about Yahoo’s nasty habit of handing information over that helps convict Chinese dissidents for a just over a year, and I’ve never been comfortable with it.

At the same time, I guess I was rationalizing the whole thing by noting that other companies over there, Google and Microsoft for instance, haven’t exactly distinguished themselves as exemplars of courage. The difference, however, is that Google and Microsoft don’t offer services that would involve being put in the position of giving up a user’s information.

Google says the evilness of its willingness to censor search results for the Chinese government is mitigated by its inclusion of a notice where a censored site would show up in the results. I agree that’s better than no notice at all, I disagree that the company’s essential complicity is meaningfully improved by that change. People in China know their government is censorious and authoritarian. Getting a little reminder now and then probably does as much good for them as me seeing a yellow ribbon magnet on someone’s SUV helps me remember we’re at war in Iraq.

Still, Google does not collect information the Chinese government is interested in, and has not been (publicly) implicated in handing any information it does have to, as the World Organization for Human Rights said of Yahoo, ‘knowingly and willfully [aid] and [abet] in the commission of torture and other major abuses violating international law.’

I see a distinction, and the nature of that distinction is enough for me to make the same tradeoffs re: doing business with Google that I make with any major corporate entity that’s behaving as a self-interested player in the global economy, with all the attendant moral problems that entails. Until the day I drop off the grid altogether — an unlikely event — that’s a set of tradeoffs and distinctions I’ll have to keep making case by case.

What do you think?