Google's possible pullout from China is, I think, both surprising and not. Filtering out references to Tiananmen Square doesn't really meet anyone's definition of a free and open Internet, and it really didn't seem sustainable for the company to ramp up selling itself at home as the protector of Internet openness (see, for example, a recent post on the Google Policy Blog that laid out what amounts to a manifesto for openness) while at the same time scrubbing search results to Beijing's liking. In many ways, it's satisfying to see the company thinking about telling Beijing to, well, stick it. But it's worth keeping in mind that the Chinese people are, again, the ones stuck with the short end of the stick. Google's argument has always been that a filtered Internet in China was better than an Internet where no one can find anything at all. Over the last several years, Google has seen itself as something of a check on Beijing's ambitions to craft a Chinese Internet in its own image and...