Google has stopped it's search service in China. In doing so it has incurred the wrath of the Chinese government, but it's betting that this will be outweighed by the mindshare it gets from younger Chinese, as a champion of free information and by showing that it can stand up to authoritative bullying. For the rest of us, this episode has a couple of sobering lessons:

1. Impounding information successfully is extraordinarily difficult today.    The world's hunger for information is insatiable, and the internet has emerged as perfectly suited to cater to this ravenous appetite. This is partly because the Internet's hubless architecture makes it enormously difficult to regulate and censor. This architecture is also hugely fail-safe, mirroring the design of human social networks. Chinese, especially the young, will continue to find ingenious ways to scale the information walls. Already use of "wall climbing software" is rife in China, and will now only increase.

2. In information censorship, success may be worse than failure.   However, the real reason why information walls shouldn't be built is perhaps not that they may fail, but that they may succeed. Frustration at being on the wrong end of a highly successful and watertight censorship campaign often has serious ramifications. Google's departure from China is a case in point - they were shackled so successfully that they just rebelled against the shackles. Successfully impounding information also sets the leadership - whether of a nation or an institution - on an increasing path of confrontation with its denizens, and this can scarcely have good consequences for anybody.

Aspiring censors - whether they speak Mandarin or Malagasy - would do well to take note of the above lessons.