The Economist puts its spin on the Google situation

The Economist thinks that there is a silver lining in the Google-China story… The fact that Google will indeed use disclaimers and will not unroll services that will make it vulnerable to collaboration with the secret police is something that deserves attention.

Economist.com | Articles by Subject | Search engines
Google has reached an agreement with the Chinese authorities that allows it to disclose to users, at the bottom of a list of search results, whether information has been withheld. This is similar to what the company does in other countries where it faces content restrictions, such as France and Germany (where Nazi sites are banned), and America (where it removes material that is suspected of copyright infringement). Although the disclosure is more prominent on these western sites, putting such a message on its Chinese site is an important step towards transparency and, furthermore, is something its rivals do not do.

Moreover, Google is tiptoeing into the country with only a handful of services. It is not offering e-mail, blogging or social-networking services, because it worries that it will not be able to ensure users’ privacy. It wishes to avoid the situation in which MSN and Yahoo! find themselves, whereby they are forced to obey the Chinese government’s orders in censoring content and revealing users’ identities. Rather than be placed in a position where it may have to compromise its values, Google instead is narrowing what it offers (although its news service will contain only government-approved media sources).