give me liberty

google has attracted pressure from two very different governments these days -- and has had to make some difficult choices. while i haven't put any thought into a holistic theory of how to appropriately respond to these - based on the depth of thought that appears in many of the google labs white papers, it is very possible they already had -- which makes a comparison of their recent choices all the more interesting.

first, china asked google to exclude certain words from their search engine -- they effectively asked for censorship. nextedly, the u.s. asked google for "all web addresses contained in the google database as well as a record of all queries that have been entered into your company's search engine between June 1, 2005 and July 31, 2005"... a request that was later reduced.

what i find interesting is that google choose to go along with former, but has so far defied the later. again, it is not clear to me why google choose to respond the way they did -- but google must think that one of these requests forces them to step past the line of their company motto "don't be evil", while the other does not.

yahoo, aol, and mircrosoft have complied with said requests. but we already knew two of the three of those were evil ;-)