Google announced that its search engine would be made available to China's 100 million users with restrictions on politically sensitive terms and websites mandated by Beijing.

* Google announced that its search engine would be made available to China's 100 million users with restrictions on politically sensitive terms and websites mandated by Beijing. China's efforts to build a great wall around the Internet are probably vain in the long run, for though you can block the threats you know, you cannot block the threats you don't. (Czarist censors kept The Wealth of Nations out of Russia, while passing Das Kapital.) But the paradox of ignorance works both ways: Clever and determined Chinese will circumvent the barriers, but what about ordinary ones? In the short run of a normal human life, millions of Chinese will be impeded; others will be arrested (Shi Tao, a journalist critical of human-rights abuses, was tracked down with the help of Yahoo!, according to Reporters Without Borders). Web users disgusted with Google's kowtow can switch to engines such as Clusty and IceRocket, which promise not to censor. And when the files of the failed Chinese state become available decades hence, how will the Internet titans look?