Here is my letter to Newsweek on the subject of Google censorship in China.

[Note from 2017: Google eventually gave up and pulled out of China rather than be censored and constrained. But American companies continue to work around restrictions and sell censorship tools to oppressive regimes.]

The question of whether to work within an oppressive regime, or hope that a boycott will force change, is always a hard one; and I’m not going to judge Google on their decision.  Keep in mind that such censorship requests don’t just come from China–even France and Germany wish to censor external web sites.  Nonetheless, there is no question in my mind that Yahoo overstepped the bounds when they turned over identifying information on a blogger.