By cooperating with Chinese Internet censorship, Google has (as Glenn Reynolds says), "lost a lot of moral capital."

This makes it very tough for bloggers like me who might otherwise defend them against the use of copyright laws to thwart the free flow of information:

The WAN, which represents 18,000 newspapers and 73 national newspaper associations, said it would examine whether new standards and policies could be drafted to create a commercial relationship between publishers, search engines and content aggregators.

Mr O’Reilly singled out Google for criticism, saying: “As a general rule, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves seem more open to constructive dialogue. It’s only Google which seems to have this absolute view [that all information should be available for free].” Google could not immediately be reached for comment.

Mr O’Reilly likened the initiative to the conflict between the music industry and illegal file-sharing websites and said it was not a sign that publishers had failed to create a competitive online business model of their own.

Google, unfortunately, does not extend its "absolutist" thinking to countries like China.

Which means they'll have fewer and fewer defenders.