Google's China operation has been grabbing global headlines since last Tuesday, when it announced that it would plan to stop censoring Google.cn search results or pull out of China after discovering a significant attack on it's technology infrastructure.  Later Google clarified that it was interested in staying in China, but would plan to reduce censorship of its Chinese search results.  Official Chinese media has dismissed Google's human rights concerns as ridiculous, stating "Whatever the real cause for Google's possible move, this case is purely business in nature and it should have nothing to do with political ideology" and adding that it was "inappropriate to play up the issue, or turn it into a political one."  

But Google's business model is particularly dependent upon a political ideology - their own, very public, vision of the Open Internet, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to yesterday when she proclaimed that the United States "stand[s] for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas."  Google has become a particularly strong voice for this growing movement toward true openness, not merely the absence of censorship but also the active practice of business transparency, content fair use, and open technology.  Their strength in the field of technology is in no small part because of their politics, and while it is true that they submitted to censorship to enter Chinese markets in 2006, in many other ways they've continued investing in the "openness" movement at home (and, of course, sparking controversy within it).  [Read more after the jump]

After all this business investment in the ideology of openness, it seems ridiculous for Chinese media to juxtapose Google's political imperative with its business imperative in China.  There may have been a number of factors prompting Google's announcement, but it can without exaggeration be seen as another public commitment to the Open Internet.  Rebecca McKinnon points out in the panel below that "[censorship] is not just a China problem... Google is making a stand about the global internet.  This is really about the future of the global internet."  Kudos to Google for taking that stand.