Dave Winer points to the BBC news story: China criticised for ban on Google. Critics are for example Reporters sans frontières. More news on the Googleban.
Besides the democratic rights issues, which I actually feel strong for, I want to point to the fact that China’s Googleban effectively is useless unless they also ban a lot more sites. I don’t just mean the big Google-partners, Netscape and DMOZ and the likes, but also many other sites. Mine, for example. In my links collection, for example, I offer additional Googlesearches delivered via the Google api web service. The user thus never accesses (interacts with) google.com, since my server does that for the user. Unless I’m mistaken, it would be very difficult for anyone from, say, the Chinese authorities to “track” this kind of google traffic.
