The Internet can be this amazing tool of liberation, opening people to perspectives they've never seen. Internet cafes pepper the street corners in Asia and Africa, allowing people to communicate with friends and family, or even strangers halfway around the world.

Of course, all this freedom of information is vulnerable to profiteering search engines and undemocratic governments. I saw a news story last night saying that Chinese bloggers using an MSN site were banned from entering phrases like human rights, or Taiwan independence. Also confirmed via BBC.

Google News censors as well, blocking certain stories for Chinese users. Apparently they argue that people wouldn't be able to access the stories anyway because of Chinese IPs blocking the sites. But wouldn't it be better if they at least knew they were being censored.

The reason the search engine blocking is so dangerous is that users can get around firewalls, using sites like this proxy. They can get around banned terms by modifying them like this: human r1ghts. But they can't get to a site if they don't know it's there.

Even from here in Canada, a Google News search for "Google censorship China" brings up quite different results than the same search on Yahoo, with the former's first hit being the above article that contains Google's rationale. Yahoo on the otherhand brings up a other stories that criticise Google more explicitly. Guess the Chinese aren't the only ones who are suffering from censorship.