I found this pretty entertaining - I guess it’s a little dated at this point but still very relevant in light of the ongoing debate about Google’s position on Chinese censorship. The attention to detail here is impressive - it’s been created to look just like the corporate pages at Google (although all the links point back to the creators at Lot49.com. The introduction, written as if a Google press release, follows:

At the 2006 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, CEO Eric Schmidt discussed Google’s decision to censor its search results. During his speech, he mentioned that we used an “evil scale” to weigh our actions. Applying that scale, we concluded that to withdraw from China would be “worse evil” than participating in censorship.

Having received a number of queries about our evil scale, we present an explanation here. Our scale divides evil into 15 degrees because we like hexidecimal and because it’s convenient for representing shades of gray online. Also, we find that the shift from numeric to alphabetic characters is useful in separating bad things from those that are really terrible.

We determined that removing certain information from search results on Google.cn rates a 6 on our scale. Withdrawing from China qualifies as an 8. Disorganized information helps no one. In fact, it is a detriment to society. When all messages are equally probable, entropy is maximized: H(M) = log | M |. We are committed to fighting entropy by organizing the world’s information. Working with Chinese censors will help us achieve our goal.

I wonder how Google feels about this stuff. They don’t yet have the reputation of other large corporations like Microsoft and AT&T for being overly sensitive about criticism of their products and policies, but you do wonder whether they will eventually move in that direction. It’s tough for any big company that strongly believes in its own mission and attitude to take criticism. So far Eric, Larry and Sergey seem to be fairly level-headed about it - let’s hope they stay that way.