David Kirkpatrick of Fortune met with Sergey Brin (one of the co-founders of Google) at the World Economic Forum at Davos and asked him about Google’s decision to censor the Internet in China (something I posted about the other day).

Sergey’s reasoning for the censorship:

We ultimately made a difficult decision, but we felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese Web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it.

In the same report, David Kirkpatrick also talks to Human Rights Watch boss Ken Roth – Ken’s attitude to this mirrors the comments I made in my post – Ken said:

the answer is only going to come through safety in numbers. And it’s going to require all of the search engines to get together and say “None of us will do this.” And China needs search engines. If it can pick them off one at a time, it wins. If it faces all of the search engines at once banding together, the search engines win.