Google, the search engine giant, struck a blow for freedom of speech and privacy when it announced last week that it is reconsidering whether to keep doing business in China after discovering what it called a series of "highly sophisticated" cyber attacks targeting Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and months of wrangling over government censorship. The company said it would pull out of the world's biggest Internet market if China continued to insist on censoring the results of Google searches there.

Though American companies generally have tried to avoid tiffs with China over its human rights policies in order to maintain access to a potentially huge market for goods and services, we wish more businesses would emulate Google's example in drawing the line at abetting government repression. The whole concept of the Internet is based on the free flow of ideas and information. Google evidently decided it wants no part of any arrangement that forces it to become the willing tool of an oppressive, authoritarian regime.

The company seems to have soured on its China operation mostly because of ethical considerations emanating from its own "don't be evil" core values and corporate culture, rather than as a reaction to its bottom line. Though China has some 338 million Internet users, Google's business there accounted for only a small fraction of the company's revenues last year.

It would be nice if Google's action proved the catalyst for a wider, much-needed debate over the extent to which American companies are willing to sacrifice their ethical principles to make a buck in a country whose human rights policies most Americans find abhorrent. As Harvard Law School professor John Palfrey told The Wall Street Journal last week, "This is the biggest and boldest statement that any large American company has made about this topic. The clarity with which they have said today that there is a limit with what they will put up with in China is breathtaking."

It would be more so if any other corporations followed suit, but so far they have not. Even so, Google's action is not insignificant.

China has opened its economy while still generally forbidding political openness. That may work so long as China's economy is focused on mass producing consumer goods. But to the extent that the drivers of the economy of tomorrow will be companies like Google, whose business is the free flow of information and ideas, China may find that it can no longer embrace economic freedom while rejecting every other kind.

Readers respond

We should all stop dong business with China.

Stop going to WalMart and all the other stores who do business with China and send them dollars, which the government then lends back to us to finance the national debt.

China now has control of enough of our debt to bankrupt our country at their whim!

John H. Clemson

Good for Google. The world is smaller, the age of information suppression is over. China has to wake up sooner or later.

Hank