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“[…] The world looks very different through the window that Google provides, in China, than through the window on the world that you have available to yourselves here. In fact, it’s not the picture window on the world, it’s a distorted lens that has been built, custom-built by Google to Chinese specifications.

Now how did that happen. Google is the company, whose mission is to organize the world’s information, and to make it universally accessible and useful. How did it come to be in the business of creating the distorting lens, rather than the picture window on the world. Well, in 2004, Google was entering the international market, it wanted to be the number-one search engine in the world, it started to do business in China. And the Chinese said, we don’t want you to show our citizens the world as it really is, with all of its complexities, and its contradictions, and its inconsistent sources of information. We want the Chinese citizens to know the world the way we want them to know the world. And, Google said, okay, we’ll give them that world instead of the world as it really is.” More

Tags: censorship, china, communism, freedom, google, search engine