The U.S. relationship with Bahrain is obviously more complicated than with Syria and Iran.

Like Syria, the government of Bahrain employs aggressive tactics to censor and monitor its people's online activity.

Consistently, Baidu has censored politically sensitive search results much more thoroughly than Google.cn.

Like it or not, Google and the Chinese government are stuck in a tense, long-term relationship, and can look forward to more high-stakes shadow-boxing in the netherworld of the world's most elaborate system of censorship.

Negative views of Pakistan expressed by prominent members of the global business community are taken more seriously by government functionaries than are appeals by human rights groups.

A moral argument about whether censorship is good or bad deteriorates quickly into accusations about who is more or less patriotic, moral, pious, and so on.