Back in 2002, I thought I learned that "Don't Be Evil" meant not rolling over when Scientology made one of its predictable bullying attempts to have its critics delisted from the Google index using provisions of the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Google's did temporarily remove the critical listings, but linked instead to a copy of the DMCA take-down request at ChillEffect.org which detailed the address of the site in question. In the end, the critics were returned to the index, and I stopped thinking of Google as just another tech company.

Nearly four years later, Google seems a lot less special and a lot more like its competitors in the search business. Google China launched last week, and instead of being congratulated for its triumphant entry into what will potentially be the world's largest Internet market, Google found itself criticized for filtering results in response to Chinese government censorship laws.

Is suppressing or limiting access to unpopular, offensive, or politically challenging ideas "being evil"? I would say it is, but let's put this in context.

Censorship is an activity that all national governments engage in, though the scope and type of censorship varies widely. Most countries in the world don't have a strong free speech tradition, and government censorship of the Internet is in fact quite common. Over twenty countries have put in place some sort of technical restriction to limit access to certain Internet content, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Myanmar, Singapore, Bahrain, Cuba, Jordan, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Kuwait, Vietnam, Syria, Iran, United Arab Emirates, and South Korea. This usually takes the form of filtering software that sits between the domestic surfer and the rest of the world, limiting access to Web sites to which the government wants to restrict access.

Probably more alarming is that Western countries that operate under censoring government not only comply with requests to filter content, they aid them technically. Most countries don't create the filtering tech themselves, but contract outside firms to design, supply and/or build their firewalls.

The punchline of this sad story shouldn't be too surprising: national Internet filtering doesn't appear to be horrible effective. First of all, it is very difficult to filter access to the huge amount of content on the Web. Google indexes several billion pages, and Google China continues to provide listings for sites about pirate radio and democracy in China. As well, there are numerous technical strategies for getting around large-scale firewalls, with the usual solution using a proxy server located outside the firewall to access banned content.

Obviously, I would rather Google China wasn't censored. I hate censorship, and free speech is a fundamental human right in part because it insures vital political process and intellectual, social, and artistic innovation. It is the key right (after safety of the person) that indicates that a society at least strives to be one of respect and tolerance of difference. But on aggregate, I would suggest that having a censored Google.cn is better than no Google at all. The huge Google index can be only imperfectly filtered, and what remains will provide additional ways for the Chinese to triangulate among different available sources to get the information they want. The alternative -- Yahoo, MSN, and Google pulling out of China and leaving that market to more censorious home-grown search services -- will further isolate China, and that will hurt the Chinese people more than the country's rulers.

"Don't Be Evil" is great slogan, but sometimes just being the lesser evil is acceptable.