Google, Paper Tiger

From Foreign Policy:

Unlike many other honorable members of the technology blogosphere, I am not too excited about Google’s ultimatum to the Chinese government (if you have been living in a cave or are not on Twitter: Google wants to either stop censoring search results on Google.cn or shut down their Chinese shop altogether).

Of course, all companies make mistakes, and Google’s executives may have discovered that they blundered when they decided to offer a censored version of Google.cn. I grant them the right to to fix the situation.

But to wrap their decision in the melodramatic rhetoric of cyberattacks on Chinese human rights activists? Give me a break…Are we really supposed to believe that, until they experienced cyberattacks on the email accounts of the Chinese human rights activists, they thought that their counterparts in the Chinese government were all good and well-meaning chaps who would never think of such a thing?