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By some estimates China has 4 million bloggers--are 30,000 Internet police really going to keep them under wraps? Sooner or later the government is going to lose the fight. Being evil just isn't as easy as it used to be, and whether or not Google's actions are ethical in principle, we should all get over the idea that the future of the People's Republic hangs on a bunch of search results.
Global corporations have always had to balance ethical, cultural and legal considerations with financial ones; asking them to define ethical foreign policy is like looking to professional athletes to develop steroid-test rules. As Page puts it, self-servingly but accurately, "It's pretty hard for companies to act as governments. To some extent that's a good thing for the U.S. State Department to be doing. I'm not sure that's our role."
For Google, getting a foothold in the Chinese market now may well be vital for its survival 20 years hence. So it's not surprising that it would trade that financial confidence for a little ethical dustup. The real risk is that some of that dust will stick to Google's snowy-white brand identity. Google trades on its image as a different kind of company. It became a little clearer last week that there can be only one kind of company: the kind that makes money.