Does censorship really matter?
Ideas have effects on lives, and removing access to the ideas (for you can’t ever remove an idea itself), does have a very real effect on us. Depending on where you live this may be a mere theoretical issue. In other countries, your freedom of speech is heavily limited in everyday communication. German writer Heinrich Heine once said, “This is only the beginning, for where they burn books, in the end they’ll burn humans too.” What we should realize when thinking about the issue is that some of the authors of material Google now agreed to censor are kept in jail for writing it. On the other hand, speeding up access to information matters as well, and Google’s voiced position is that providing a self-censored local search engine provides a better overall search service.
