You mean the virtue of their choice to not provide those porn searches to the government? The virtue (if there is a moral one) is to avoid the slippery slope. It's not about the virtue of who may or may not be targeted now; it's about whether the slippery slope may lead to other more innocent people being targeted later.

But I doubt they made the decision on a moral basis but rather on a business one. Honoring the request opens the door to them being expected to do it again in the future. And again, and again. And their business is not to give data to the government upon request. And if they give it to the government of the U.S., then quite possibly other governments would line up with similar requests. It could just become a time-consuming, costly thing that doesn't help their bottom line and could potentially hurt it if people started getting paranoid about using the search engine because they're afraid they were being closely monitored.



I didn't say they took a moral stand or defended some great principle of freedom. They did, in both cases, what's in the best interest of their business. In the case of what they did at home, it happened to also be in the interested of privacy of private citizens which I happen to think is the interest of freedom. In the case of China, unfortunately, it was a business decision that was most likely not in the interest of freedom.

Would they have earned some kudos if they refused to yield to China's demands? Probably, from those that are not their shareholders. The shareholders would most likely be asking why Google just gave up, potentially, 17% of the world market. Their business is to provide search results and make money doing so--not to try to change the policies of foreign governments.

Regards,
Craig Steiner