When you have a few billion potential customers living inside your country, and a totalitarian monopoly on who gets to sell to them, you wield quite a bit of power on the global business climate.

Such is the case this week as the government of China is now redirecting searches from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search engines, and sending them to the China based Baidu.com.

The fact that this action comes about 3 minutes after the Dali Lama received a Congressional Medal of Honor is at best, "sketchy."   

This kind of activity puts American companies in a tough spot.  From everything I know, supporting the Dali Lama is the *right* thing to do.  China is effectively pushing American companies to try to convince the U.S. government to change their chance.  This will not be the last time a U.S. firm is going to have decide on whether they are beholden to shareholder value or global ethics.  Redirecting IP packets is simply the easiest thing China could do.  It will be interesting to see what comes next.