The wise old Chinese sage says: 

Beware of convoluted explanations for transparently self-serving behavior.

Translation for today:

When Google says it is promoting freedom and democracy by extending its
business in China while censoring out references to freedom and
democracy–and to the Dalai Lama, by the way–beware.

In my own experience Occams razor holds for virtue, too.

In business they sometimes call this “passing the red face test.”

Technical post script:

Google says that the reason it wants servers in China is to give its
users a better experience-translated as “faster.”  Why didn’t it
instead invest in Satellite downloads, servers ringing china, and
working with activists to set up informal networks of proxy-servers,
just as the p2p music sites do?  Hey, Google COULD have done good
with its money.

Do you want the real reason Google is in China?  Read on..

What Google can not do in China,
without partnering with  the government and censoring its content,
is sell advertising.  In my own discussions with Google folks last
year, what I heard was
that the only way to expand the Google advertising business into China
was to set up a Chinese subsidiary and have Chinese servers.  Yup,
I really really don’t believe Google was most concerned about download
speeds. Google was concerned about ad revenues and being able to sell
ads to Chinese businesses.

Again, beware of convoluted explanations.

Some say that while Google censoring words like “democracy” in its
Chinese search service is clearly counter to democratic values, Google
is no worse than other tech companies who are helping censoring in
China. 

Well, on that I agree.  On the other hand, Google GETTING AWAY
WITH EVIL does strike me as worse. You see, Google is a company that
says it does not do evil.  Thus it has a great deal of trouble
with the idea that what it is doing in China is anything other than
good.  Google does not think that it is guilty.  Google
thinks it is being virtuous. Google argues that it is “promoting
freedom” by offering a censored version of its service.  Hmmmm.

Peter Gomes (Havard Chaplain) asks, “What is worse, and excess of vice,
or an excess of virtue?”  His own counter-intuitive answer is that
an excess of (mistaken) virtue is much much worse, because it has not
built-in limiting impulse.  Nazis had an excess of (their own
deluded intretation of) virtue.

There is an even stronger, darker way to see the Google
situation.  Maybe Google was always a “business” in the narrow
sense, but exploited our idealism.  Maybe Google never intended it
would “not do evil” as you and me understand it.  Maybe it said it
would not do Evil ™ as it chose to define it.  I once took a
course in “Non-manipulative ™ selling.”  It was just as you
might suspect.

Google has also gotten a lot of good press over the years, and a lot of traffic and
participation, because many folks on the web are idealistic enough to
favor a company that seems to want to do good.  Does Google deserve
this boost?  Did it ever?

My favorite post on the Google situation is this by Dave Winer.

Ingid Jones today offers the world a valentine.  It is incredibly beautiful and sad, and you really should read it.

First, let me say that St. Valentine’s day can be about love in the
most inclusive form, love for each other, for sure, but love for all of
us, together, and–as the Buddhists say–”love for all sentient beings.”

Let’s take back Valentine’s day from the jewelers, from the card
makers, and from the sellers of expensive meals in cheesy bars…

And let’s extend Valentine’s day to the least of us around the
world.  In the case of Ingrid, and me, and Joanne/Fishweasel, and
so many others, this includes those who suffer today in Sudan. 

So long ago now, Joanne wrote an essay, The Passion of the Present,
that was posted on a simple site on the Internet, and circulated widely
on email lists through informal networks of concerned
people–importantly including Joanne’s sister Mary Fran, an activist
Catholic. 

Ingrid Jones was probably the first blogger on earth to blog for those
in Sudan.  She has been remarkably faithful, running her own
blogs, including Sudan Watch, helping to found with several of us, including me and Joanne, the group blog Sudan: The Passion of the Present. 
Ingrid has provided consistent care, hope and needed cheer within a
tragic and perhaps endless campaign to end just one particular genocide.

The bad news–very bad–is that we learned a great deal about the
limits of public opinion to change history, at least this history. We
really did believe that we might be able to stop a genocide.  As
Ingrid reports, when we started the death toll was reported to be
10,000.  Now it is at least 400,000.  Probably more. 
The only thing that limits the actual death toll is that the victims
are spread widely across a large geographical area, so they are
difficult to completely exterminate.  On the other hand, this same
dispersal makes keeping an accurate count very diffcult, and terrible
things can happen where no one but the victims and the criminals
witness.

The good news is that many of us have concluded that we cannot stop
particular genocides, but perhaps we can stop genocide.  The Genocide Intervention  Network has been born of this idea.

A rule of Web 2.0 is that the spider does the work. 

Let’s say, for example, that you have something you want to say to
others.  You can email it–which has you doing the work.  You
can put it in a central database, where others can find it (as in a
forum, eBay, Craig’s List) if they go and search the database. 
This is still a lot of work.  Or you can just put it in your blog
or other distributed source, and let a spider come in, pull in what you
have made available, and do the distribution for you.

This, note, is the real power of Google.  The spider does the
work.  You put stuff on your blog or your web site and, pow,
Google spiders come in during the night, take the material, and put it
into their database, all organized and ready to go.

But a subtle feature of Google enabled a new wave of innovation, by allowing site-specific Google searches.

Now what is happening in Web 2.0 is that folks are now learning to communicate with spiders in a more specialized way.

Folks can set up site-specific Google searches that keep track of categories, titles,  references, or tags.

This uses Google as a general-purpose query machine and report generator, and uses one or more sites as the repository of data.

Viola!  No more centralized, user-administered database. 
Instead, the user puts data anywhere he or she wants, and the spider
does the work.  Then the user can go to the spider’s web, Google,
and gain access to what the spider has assembled.

The spider does the work.