content: Despite the fact that iPhones can run into multiple months of salary for many chinese they are still popular status symbols. China is the fastest growing market for Apple. Every company after growth ends up doing this eventually.  Were you surprised when Google announced they enter China, with all the censorship compromises that brings?  Yes, I think it was quite disappointing. I wasn’t as surprised as many commentators, but I wasn’t very happy about it. The old Google would have said “We don’t compromise on free speech” and started investing in software like Tor so that people in China could reach whatever web sites they pleased.  Now they’ve also added a self-censored Google Maps search, image search, books search and so on... and the censorship in some of these is very implicit (e.g. they don’t even add international publishers to the book search on Google.cn). What do you think is the right reaction from people to online censorship?  I think all censorship should be deplored. My position is that bits are not a bug – that we should create communications technologies that allow people to send whatever they like to each other. And when people put their thumbs on the scale and try to say what can and can’t be sent, we should fight back – both politically through protest and technologically through software like Tor.  7000   (Tor is a program that allows for completely anonymous Internet use, by routing your traffic through dozens of other machines.)  But most technology makers today seem to go a different route. They compromise, and they might defend this compromise by saying it will bring greater freedom in the long run. What do you say to this argument?  How is compromising supposed to bring greater freedom in the long run? That’s like saying “I’m going to beat you up now so that you don’t have to be hit as much in the long run.” The right answer is to stop beating people up.  http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-05-07-n78.html