I think there are two things to say. The first is that you aren’t comparing like for like. In the Chinese case, the Chinese government gets to choose what is censored and any search engine has to censor the same things, whereas in the US it would presumably be Google that gets to decide what to censor and so someone could conceivably go to another search engine to avoid it.
It’s also worth noting that even if search results are censored, in the US model the websites can still be accessed (although US-based illegal websites can get shut down), whereas in the Chinese model the websites themselves are banned.
The second is that even if one were to accept that the models are similar, that doesn’t mean that google has to have both or have none. It could take any stance on what level of censorship (or pushing down in search rankings) is acceptable in what cases and choose what to do based on that.
For example google already tries to remove spam that tries to gain its rankings but I don’t see people complaining that Google’s rankings unfairly penalise these sites and suppress their “free speech.”
> In the Chinese case, the Chinese government gets to choose what is censored and any search engine has to censor the same things, whereas in the US it would presumably be Google that gets to decide what to censor and so someone could conceivably go to another search engine to avoid it.
I don't think that's true.
Google (and any other search engine) is compelled by US law to take down content that violates copyright. In China, Google will be compelled by Chinese law to take down content that e.g. criticize the government. See the similarities?
Sure, you could argue that taking down copyright infringing content is ultimately good for society, while taking down content critical of the government is bad for society, and yes I am of that opinion myself.
But this is a subjective moral judgement, and not a universal truth. And just like there are people in the US who morally object to copyright enforcement, you will find people in China who do _not_ morally object to censorship, at all.
In any case, it's not like Google is making any _less_ information available to Chinese internet users by operating in China. Whatever will be censored was already inaccessible to Chinese internet users, because Baidu, Bing and so on are already applying the same censorship anyway.
I think I was maybe unclear in my first reply but I think that it is ultimately a moral judgement of the company (ie the company’s management plus any employeee unrest) as to whether they (a) operate in some market following its laws, and (b) what rules or policies they apply on their own accord.
Just because this is a fuzzy moral judgement it does not mean that one must choose an absolute (although this may be an easier position to hold), but rather (and this is what I am suggesting is likely to happen) they will choose somewhere in between, even if this is not a consistent position. Therefore it is silly to say things are the same when different people consider them different in different ways and those people may influence the decision of google to enter/leave the market or to change internal policies.
There really is a way to balance these two things: you don't censor outright, but you just don't rank it highly. So it's not easy to find, but the moment someone searches about something, or spends more and more time narrowing down results in search of something that matches a piece of data - if they really want to find data pertaining to their query - then in the index they can.
It might result in a resources problem (or storage and computing power), but theoretically it could even exhaustively apply to spam. Even spam would be indexed in a radical free speech database, but with good algorithms it'll just take longer to find because a very small (almost zero) people in the world algorithmically denote it as content of worth.
It’s also worth noting that even if search results are censored, in the US model the websites can still be accessed (although US-based illegal websites can get shut down), whereas in the Chinese model the websites themselves are banned.
The second is that even if one were to accept that the models are similar, that doesn’t mean that google has to have both or have none. It could take any stance on what level of censorship (or pushing down in search rankings) is acceptable in what cases and choose what to do based on that.
For example google already tries to remove spam that tries to gain its rankings but I don’t see people complaining that Google’s rankings unfairly penalise these sites and suppress their “free speech.”