Apparently, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, all American tech giants, will do anything for money, including helping China’s dictators censor the World Wide Web. The three companies have set up search portals for the Peoples’ Republic. A search portal is a Web page in which users can type words or phrases they are interested in. The portal displays a list of websites that match the terms the user typed.

The problem here is that Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! are censoring the search results – to the communist dictators’ specifications. According to USAToday,

Software giant Microsoft has agreed to block certain words - democracy, freedom and human rights among them - by users on parts of its new Chinese Internet portal. According to news reports, the words trigger this message: "This item should not contain forbidden speech, such as profanity." …

Yahoo China signed a pledge of "self-discipline" in 2002, vowing to refrain from posting "pernicious information that may jeopardize state security."

Google launched a news search engine in China last year, but searchers in China get a different list of news links than someone doing a similar search in the USA. Missing links include the BBC and Voice of America, which carry reports not to China's liking.

One would think that companies that have flourished precisely because of America’s economic and democratic freedoms would be reticent to help dictators do anything. Alas, this is not so of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! USAToday continues,

The companies offer terse explanations.

A Google spokesman says it has removed sources that wouldn't be accessible to users in China anyway to create "the best possible news search experience." Microsoft and Yahoo spokesmen say companies must obey laws and regulations of the countries where they do business.

True, up to a point. But companies with traditions of defending free speech have rejected such compromises. For instance, Time, USA TODAY, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have policies against bowing to censorship. Time Asia was banned for three years in China for running afoul of censors with a story on the Falun Gong sect.

Apologists argue that U.S. companies would be locked out of China if they didn't cooperate, closing China off from outside influence. But the Chinese government needs them as much as they need the Chinese. A little hard bargaining might go a long way.

Ultimately, censorship might prove futile. Internet use in China has quadrupled since 2000. There's no way even China's censors can keep 94 million users away from ideas the government finds objectionable.

The American experience is that ideas are impossible to quell. Companies that have flourished in that free system would do better to stand up to censors than to join them.

USAToday is correct, and is to be admired for not participating in such egregious censorship. It also correct in stating, “There's no way even China's censors can keep 94 million users away from ideas the government finds objectionable.”

But the sad fact of the matter is that some U.S. companies are more interested in pleasing their shareholders than they are in upholding the principles on which they would claim their companies were founded.