Google's corporate motto is "don't be evil." It's increasingly a burden, as Google expands its reach into more countries and more industries. Years ago, Google cofounder Sergey Brin used to walk the don't-be-evil beat personally. "Evil is what Sergey says is evil," CEO Eric Schmidt told Wired in 2003. Evil, then, did not include bowing to China's regime of Internet censorship, a decision Brin made after reading a half-dozen books on Chinese politics and history he ordered on Amazon.com.

Evil at Google is more nuanced today, and requires three lawyers. But the same justification for kowtowing to China's Communists generally rules today: The world is better off with a bowdlerized Google than no Google at all. Wong, a deputy general counsel, works with lawyer Andrew McLaughlin and general counsel Kent Walker, touts her free-speech credentials. Wong and Walker pursued journalism in college; McLaughlin fought against a U.S. Internet-censorship law, the Communications Decency Act.

The acquisition of YouTube has complicated matters for Wong. Though Google lawyers like to talk about its online-video site as if it were just hosting a bring-your-own-clips party, in the eyes of most governments, YouTube is acting like a TV network — and they're quite accustomed to censoring broadcasters. That keeps Wong busy deciding whether a video deemed offensive to Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turksih state, can be displayed in that country, or whether a protest clip breaks Thailand's lèse-majesté law.

It's a job she'd just as soon not have. Far from reveling in her power as de facto censor of the Internet, or glorying in her role as a champion of free speech, she'd just as soon have censorship farmed off to an algorithm. Google's preferred solution is to have bureaucrats in censorious countries generate lists of offensive URLs for it servers to weed out automatically.

Perhaps that's just as well. Wong isn't doing the heavy lifting of blocking Internet content on behalf of governments; that falls on 20something "reviewers" who manually review complaints about YouTube videos and Blogger posts. The Times profile of Wong doesn't reveal anything about their journalistic credentials, but given career prospects in the field, we wouldn't be surprised if there weren't a few J-school types in their ranks.

That's the reality Wong, I suspect, really would rather not address: Google's censors are real human beings. We just don't know anything about them. And yet they know all about us.

(Photo by Bart Nagel for Google)

• Alan Levy (BlogTalkRadio)
• Alec Oxenford (OLX, DineroMail)
• Alejandro Estrada (DineroMail)
• Alexis Bonte (Erepublik.com)
• Andrew McLaughlin (Google)
• Anil de Mello (Mobuzz)
• Arturo J. Paniagua (Hipertextual)
• Auren Hoffman (Rapleaf)
• Axel Schmiegelow (Sevenload, Denkwerk Group)
• Benjamí Villoslada (Menèame)
• Brent Hoberman (Mydeco)
• Carlos Martìn (IG Expansiòn)
• Cedric Maloux
• Christophe F. Maire (Nokia gate5, investor)
• Claudia Gisiger-Gonzalez (UNHCR)
• Dan Dubno (Blowing Things Up)
• David Sifry (Technorati)
• Demian M. Bellumio (Cyloop)
• Eduardo Arcos (Hipertextual)
• Efe Cakarel (The Auteurs)
• Ehssan Dariani (studiVZ)
• Esteban Sosnik
• Esther Dyson (EDventure)
• Felix Petersen (Plazes)
• Hans Peter Brøndmo (Plum)
• Ibrahim Evsan (Sevenload)
• Ivan Communod (Vpod.tv)
• Jacob Hsu (Symbio)
• James Gutierrez (Progress Financial)
• Jennifer L. Schenker (BusinessWeek)
• John Markoff (The New York Times)
• Joichi Ito (Creative Commons, Six Apart Japan, investor)
• Jon Berrojalbiz (Trading Motion)
• Jonas Birgersson (Labs2)
• Jörg Rohleder (Vanity Fair)
• José María Figueres (Grupo Felipe IV)
• Jose Marin (IG Expansion)
• Julio Alonso (Weblogs SL)
• Lars Hinrichs (XING)
• Loïc Le Meur (Seesmic)
• Louise T Blouin MacBain (Louise Blouin Media)
• Lukasz Gadowski (Spreadshirt.com, investor)
• Lukasz Wejchert (Onet.pl)
• Marc Samwer (European Founders Fund)
• Marcelo Claure (Brightstar Corp.)
• Marko Ahtisaari (Blyk, Dopplr, FON)
• Mathias Entenmann (Betfair)
• Matt Biddulph (Dopplr)
• Megan Smith (Google)
• Michael Arrington (Techcrunch)
• Michael Jackson (Mangrove Capital Partners)
• Michael Wolf (Farallon Point)
• Nikesh Arora (Google)
• Ola Ahlvarsson (Result, FON)
• Om Malik (Giga Omni Media)
• R.J. Friedlander (Grupo Planeta)
• Ricardo Galli (Menéame)
• Rodrigo Sepúlveda Schulz (Vpod.tv)
• Rupert Schäfer (DLD, Hubert Burda Media)
• Scott Rafer (Lookery, Mashery, Winksite)
• Tariq Krim (Netvibes)
• Thomas Crampton (Next Media)

Not my argument. Rather, that s the other side s argument, and the one that has to be addressed by proponents of Net Neutrality (like me!). I even later joked about the inevitability of being misquoted. And yes, sure enough.

Oh, it happened more than once, Andrew. [GigaOM]
And so it begins: a judge orders Google to hand a Gmail account to the feds. Suddenly that "delete" button looks a little better than "archive." [Techdirt]
Esthrfication watch: still stripping vowels, and Mark "Zuckrbrg" is a double victim. [Esther Dyson on Flickr]