Dan Gillmor says that the Chinese version of Microsoft's blogging service automatically censors content that contains words like "democracy," "human rights," "demonstration," "Dalai Lama," and "Falun Gong." He notes that Google caused a ruckus when Google News omitted news sources deemed unsavory by the Chinese government:

Now it's easy to understand why our craven corporate giants are doing the dictator's bidding, but Microsoft and Google like so many others rose to their enormous wealth and influence by leveraging freedom -- the freedom they enjoy in the United States.

They may be serving their shareholders' interests, but what they're doing is not honorable. Why does money trump honor? Is this the American way?

According to Reporters Without Borders, if the prohibited words are included in a blog entry, the Microsoft service does not allow it to be posted. An error message is displayed instead: "This message contains a banned expression, please delete this expression."

Reporters Without Borders says that Yahoo! has also agreed to remove all "subversive" content from their search results in China. While Google is the only major search engine that has so far refused to censor search results, Reporters Without Borders is concerned that Google "looks likely to follow in the footsteps of their competitor."

While Google does not censor search results, they do limit the news sources that are indexed in the Chinese version of Google News. Google explained their "difficult decision" on Chinese censorship last year in their company blog, saying:

For Internet users in China, Google remains the only major search engine that does not censor any web pages. However, it's clear that search results deemed to be sensitive for political or other reasons are inaccessible within China. There is nothing Google can do about this.

For last week's launch of the Chinese-language edition of Google News, we had to decide whether sources that cannot be viewed in China should be included for Google News users inside the PRC. Naturally, we want to present as broad a range of news sources as possible....

Google News does not show news stories, but rather links to news stories. So links to stories published by blocked news sources would not work for users inside the PRC -- if they clicked on a headline from a blocked source, they would get an error page. It is possible that there would be some small user value to just seeing the headlines. However, simply showing these headlines would likely result in Google News being blocked altogether in China....

We also considered the amount of information that would be omitted. In this case it is less than two percent of Chinese news sources. On balance we believe that having a service with links that work and omits a fractional number is better than having a service that is not available at all.

So a little censorship isn't so bad, right? After all, it's only 2% of all the content in China. And it's not about censorship, its about the "user experience."

Baloney. From where I sit, evil is evil, whether it's a little or a lot. While I'm disappointed that Microsoft and Yahoo would develop censorship technology to enable an oppressive regime, there's never been any illusion about their motives -- Microsoft and Yahoo have always been "craven corporate giants" with the amoral goal to increase shareholder wealth.

But Google says they're a different breed of corporation, run with higher principles and a "Don't Be Evil" ethic. For a company with a mission to make the world's information "universally accessible and useful," intentionally censoring the most critical 2% is hypocritical and evil.

It stamps the Google brand on odious and evil practices, legitimizing a totalitarian regime.