"Both China and Apple have stuck to their tried-and-true policies of silence in the face of external controversy."

Relating Apple to China (or vice versa!) in a single sentence. Great!

China would want the Police

(and Apple) are both evil... the fact the the olympic took place in china is a discrace to the human race and the fact the apple remove perfectly legal song to serve the illegal and illegitimate china goverment is just another proof that Apple is no better then china...

It's amazing how a dictatorship can disconnect an entire country from accessing a service and websites, and yet no one can pull the plug on scam web sites.

Truly shocking...

When Government grows larger, it gets involved in people's lives and becomes Socialism. As Socialism grows, people figure out you can control people, and it becomes Communism.

Government should merely be the arbitrator between citizens for fair market and natural resources and protector of individual rights. Any step beyond that removes freedoms that only continue to be diminished over time.

Nowhere is it said that apple removed the songs.

Quite the opposite: "But Chinese officials have now seemingly realized there's a defter way to eliminate digital undesirables on iTunes rather than nuking the entire store from orbit."

Which means that Austin Modine suggests that China has blocked the one part of the site that was offering that download, not Apple.

While I certainly strongly oppose a lot of the policies of the Chinese government, and some of them do indeed contravene international law, that doesn't stop it being the legitimate government of the country.

"the fact the the olympic took place in china is a discrace to the human race"

Hmmm- There's been a lot of this style of comment around and about over the last month or so. I'm amused that westerners demand that China evolves at western timescales.

I was in Hongkong in the late 70's and travelled into China in the days when you were escorted around the place by ministry "guides". I lived and studied in China proper during the early 1990's. Having just got back from Beijing, I am staggered at the progress that they have made in the last 20 years. Beijing was so far away from what I remembered it as in 1993 as to be unrecognisable- both in terms of the built environment and the spirit of openness of the people

This is a country with the oldest continuous written culture in the world. They measure time not in years, or reigns but dynasties. Democracy and western-style human rights just isn't going to happen overnight, and even when it does, it's just not going to look like it does in the UK/US. It's a very different country, and it's worldview reflects that.Christ, even their map projections show the Pacific in the centre, reflecting China's name for itself : "Zhongguo"- the middle kingdom.

I also wonder exactly what the folks who were against the Olympics going to China expect: if the they weren't given it as a political slap, would they have suddenly gone "All right the, open up the polling booths and get out the application forms for Falun Gong, we'll show them!"?

hear hear...

Corporations being evil are just acting true to their nature.

Alien overlord because I love them and would like to be considered for promotion.

"the fact the apple remove perfectly legal song to serve the illegal and illegitimate china goverment"

Dude, what's legal in one country may not be legal in another.

Not Sting - our national hero and saviour of rainforest folks?

The same twat who was happy to advertise Jaguar cars, those well known eco-friendly vehicles.

Oh, and all those who are happy to berate China forget that we are also happy to have all our dodgy manufacturing done there rather than next door. "It's Capitalism, Jim, but not as we'd like it". Here in the Wonderful West(tm) we don't have child labour anymore (no, we rely on everywhere else having it or we don't get cheap PC's and mobes).

It's a minor miracle that China can manage to feed its entire population, whilst slowly increasing it standard of living, and the government of China is quite legal and quite Legitimate, even if you happen not to like it.

I agree that China is hardly a utopia, but perhaps we should get our own house in order before we start trying to sort out everyone else eh?

Let’s look at the facts -

We live in a country where we are watched all the time by the most comprehensive CCTV system in existence. Our government want to force us to carry identification at all times and want to create a system that stores the details of every telephone call we make, every email we write, every website we visit and keeps them indefinitely. We can be arrested and held for a long period without any significant evidence and can be charged with a criminal offence for even trying to read certain books. Our government has been quite happy for our citizens to be held without trial for an indefinite period by a foreign power and tortured, because it suited their own political ends.

We have recently invaded two separate sovereign nations, deposed their governments and installed ones more to our liking, purely because it suited our political goals and offered us economic benefit.

Forget China - I think it is a disgrace that WE are being allowed to host the Olympics.

... of this myself. Been in China for 2 years now (UK expat). I couldn't get on iTunes Store last week for some unknown reason, but my pre-subscribed pod casts all downloaded no problem. Yet still I couldn't access iTunes store - just got a network access error. I even went as far as re-installing iTunes but to no avail. Then I read on El Reg about the *ahem* "outage" of iTunes in China and all fell into place! I still wouldn't swap China for the UK. I feel less observed and free over here than I feel I would be in the UK. I was always jealous of those that had the bottle to leave cctv.tax.p1sstake.gov.uk, but now I'm out, living the dream. In the land of the free (!)....

Mine's the 'copter with patented tech from the US... :o)

> the fact the the olympic took place in china is a discrace to the human race

Yeah... as opposed to ooooh, the 1936 Berlin Olympics? Overseen by a funny little man with a small moustache.

> I think it is a disgrace that WE are being allowed to host the Olympics.

Not to worry, it'll be 2 years late and £9 billion over-budget - aaaaah the English, we can "fuck up a sunrise" as I read in a Bill Bryson book once.