blog politics

I heard a story last night on radio (The World) about censorship and blogs. I guess MSN's blogging service, MSN Space, is complying with Chinese government censors to block blog posts with titles that contain words like freedom, democracy, Taiwan, Falun Gong, etc. Boing Boing has a good article on it (can't believe that Boing Boing is still around!). I think one of the more frightening aspects of this trend, in which corporations like Microsoft and Google cooperate with local governments, is how local "community standards" are impacting the globally published writing that happens on blogs. Who sets those standards? Governments? Does it matter when the government setting the standard is not democratic and its constituents don't have a voice in setting those standards? Besides that, how "smart" is the software that monitors blog posts? Maybe our panoptics are a bit off?