Google: Do no evil ... except in China

The news that Google has won a contract to provide news to Internet users in China is one more example of the search giant's hypocrisy. It claims not merely to be a profit-making machine, but a force for good in the world. When it comes to China, though, it's on the side of censorship, authoritarians, Communists, and would-be dictators.

Reuters reports that Google has just won a license to provide news in China. Of course, what China calls "news" and what we call "news" are entirely separate things. China heavily censors all Internet content, and has built what's called the Great Firewall around the country, to try and keep out any information the Communist government doesn't want people to read.

Reuters recently ran a story detailing just how extreme censorship is in China, and how effective the Great Wall is. News is censored, of course, and news stories are blocked. But it goes far beyond that. The entire Flickr site is blocked, for example, because photos of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were posted on it.

Google knows all about the censorship first hand. It already censors its Chinese search site at the behest of the Communist government.

That's bad enough. But providing heavily censored "news" goes one step further. By doing it, Google will in essence become a propaganda arm of the government. But Google has made it clear that's perfectly fine. All it cares about is its pursuit of the almighty dollar...or yuan.