Hope for the libertarians

In the midst of all this economic nightmarishness, I wanted to post a little glimmer of glee that's been floating around techie circles this last week or so.

Google tells China to straighten up and fly right

The summary of the story has made it to the popular press. China tried to peek in Google's servers to snoop on some Chinese folk. Google said "nu-unh" and removed all their search filtering, have started delaying products, and are otherwise retaliating.

More to the point, Google is deciding how involved they're going to be there, not the other way around.

That's right. A private company, that didn't even exist fifteen years ago, in an industry that didn't exist a generation ago - now has the confidence to talk smack to one of the lead runners-up for superpower status on this little ol' ball of blue.

Now I'll be honest - I'd been tiring of Google left-coast PC for ages, and finally got sick of 'em with the '08 election, and their own little "look how awesome Obama is" preplanned searches on their homepage all through the thing. I skipped for Bing as soon as I saw it did as good a job and wouldn't proselytize to me.

BUT.

If you like the idea of say Neal Stephenson's claves, or the waning of State power... mark this week on your calendar. This is the week a company told a country to stick it.... and got away with it.

It may have happened here and there before... but for good or ill - it's gonna happen again, and likely more often.