yesthattom | Google finally speaks up about Google in China

http://computerworld.com/developmenttopics/websitemgmt/story/0,10801,109117,00.html

Since I'm not a spokesperson I haven't felt comfortable responding because I don't have the whole story, and speculating can be more dangerous than one would think.

However it is this quote that makes public one thing that I don't think most people know:

Google has agreed to Chinese censorship within the Google.cn domain because that's simply part of lawfully doing business in China, Norvig said. "No matter what you do, censorship is there," he said. China's government can enforce censorship at the Internet service provider level, so having sites removed from the Google search results isn't necessarily making matters any worse, he added. In fact, the performance slowdown associated with such ISP censorship is one of Google's stated reasons for launching the Google.cn site.
Google has taken the tack of adding a "level of transparency" by indicating when results are being censored, "so at least the user knows what's going on," Norvig said.

In other words, the ISPs in China are in cahoots with the government. It really changes the game.