Bravo! I have long thought that Google didn’t live up to their motto, particularly with regards to China. Google has been censoring or allowing the Chinese government to sensor their content for China for the last four or five years. The censoring is sever, not just getting rid of a few anti-government sites. Then “someone” in China hacked into Goggles servers and compromised the Gmail accounts… but what Chinese based authoritarian semi-communist regime would want to hack into the accounts of Chinese human rights activists? Google has since said they will no longer sensor their search results in China and will leave China if they are forced to sensor. (They will be)

Google had previously defended its position in China using what CEO Eric Schmidt called the “evil scale” which essentially is a balancing system, allowing smaller evils for a greater good. While this sounds noble, it also sounds like a slippery slope. I think Hitler used a similar sort of logic or the holocaust, the end justifies the means.

Google will most likely remove itself from the fastest growing internet market, soon to pass the US. Google is a distant second for search engines in China, and apparently Google doesn’t translate well and most Chinese haven’t a clue how to spell it, but still huge and second place isn’t bad. Unfortunately the Chinese citizens will lose an option, the “good” Google had censored for in the first place.

Perhaps Google just has a zero tolerance hacking rule? Like some sort of school weapons policy. Whatever the reason though I personally feel Google has lived up to its motto with this decision. Congratulations Google, maybe you haven’t turned into a hypocritical, sold out, corporate greed powered, ROI focused, evil mega corporation after all. I take back a lot of what I said about you over the last couple of years (accept the stuff regarding Google and SEO, but that’s more of just having different opinions). This is the cool company I remember first hearing about in 2000 and it’s good to see it isn’t gone. So please continue to stand by what you say and “don’t do evil”.