Posted by Donald Cohen-Cutler, Legislative Assistant

Google, defender of the freedom of information and expression, iconoclast of the search engines and true civil liberties patriot has bowed to the pressure of China. Oh to defend life, liberty and the American way, until it hurts the bottom line. With last week’s announcement that Google would not hand-over data regarding child pornography and other illicit behavior of its users, many in the civil liberties communities and privacy advocates hailed this move as fabulous corporate responsibility.

Now, when the second largest economy in the world and civil and human rights abuser of the first degree threatens finical determent, Google gives way. China asked Google to place filters on its searches to limit the information that is searchable for Chinese citizens.

China is a largely untapped market with more than a billion of potential consumers, but the “not evil” corporate empire known as Google has simply become another pawn in the international game of human life. Oh well. So much for “the need for information crosses all borders.”

According to it's website “Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Perhaps a brief amendment would include “Google’s mission is to organize government approved information and make it accessible and useful to those who are smart enough to know what is the truth.”

Google released a statement defending its actions stating that some information is better than no information. Andrew McLaughlin senior policy council for Google stated in a release, "While removing search results inconsistent with Google's mission," providing no information — or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information — is more inconsistent with our mission" (read it here.) However in further research on this topic, it is clear that this has little to do with a mission and everything to do with the bottom line.

Corporations will never act responsibly if there is not a large consumer demand it for responsible corporate behavior. Google, like most of the other search engines, have enabled China to continue its repression of millions of people. By applauding Google’s efforts to safeguard the privacy of its American users and saying nothing about the implicit repression of millions of Chinese, we are not acting responsibly. We need to create a demand for our corporations to act with values in mind.