Guys over at MSN: sorry, I don’t agree with your being used as a state-run thug.

...should Google decide to capitulate in China, such a move could lead to charges that the company has done the same in any number of other places. "What may be most important is not the single concessionary act to China, but the precedent that this act would set for Google, namely, that the level of censorship before entry in specific markets will be negotiated on a case-by-case basis," Schell (a China scholar and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley) says.

FORBIDDEN IDEAS With more than 100 million users, the Internet is booming in China. The American Web giants Microsoft, Yahoo and Google have all grabbed a piece of the lucrative Chinese market - but only after agreeing to help the government censor speech on the Web. In providing portals or search engines, all three companies are abiding by the government's censorship of certain ideas and keywords, like "Tiananmen massacre," "Taiwanese independence," "corruption" and "democracy." Most foreign news sites are blocked. This year, Yahoo even supplied information that helped the government track and convict a political dissident who sent an e-mail message with forbidden thoughts from a Yahoo account; he was sentenced to 10 years in jail. "Business is business," said Jack Ma, Yahoo's chief in China. "It's not politics."

Google soon had more than one hundred engineers in the company, but no focused approach to managing how their time was spent. Unsure of the best way to handle such growth, the triumvirate set up a traditional management structure based on hierarchy -- teams of engineers reporting to more than a dozen engineering managers, who in turn reported to Brin and Page. But the approach began to feel top-heavy and bureaucratic -- it was slowing down innovation. In September 2001, Brin and Page gathered all the engineering managers together at a companywide meeting -- then informed them they were out of a job.

...Instead of unwiedly, top-down project that harnessed dozens of engineering resources, Brin and Page created a more dynamic structure in which small teams of engineers tackled hundreds of projects, all at once. Brin, Page, and other senior managers reviewed each project on a regular basis, and the best project received further funding and human resources. A Top 100 list was soon developed, and engineers competed to make it up to a top ranking -- not unlike Google's search results. The company launched Google Labs, where interesting new projects -- the best of the Top 100 -- could have an early public preview.