Just occasionally Snowblog is on the button! Yesterday I asked whether the world was just beginning to get tough with China over its systemic abuses to human rights. Yesterday that pressure came from iron ore producers, today it’s Google.

The search engine is considering pulling out of China altogether after discovering a coordinated attack on accounts it hosts for human rights campaigners.

Google’s darkest hour was recorded in 2006 when the company agreed to censor its site in China in return for a permit to run a limited Chinese search engine.

It has blown up in their faces – China’s and Google’s. This has all the stink of the Chinese thought-police hacking into dissidents’ email accounts and into the traffic of multinational corporations.

We must hope the Chinese throw Google out altogether – jam the site and worse.

That in its turn will stir the increasingly savvy Chinese cyber-folk. China’s attempt to limit its people’s access to the web are doomed to failure – the genie is out fo the bottle.

China’s action may be the most tangible infringement of the activities of the masses since the imposition of the “one child per couple policy” – this time round the masses may not prove quite so quiescent.

Meantime I admit, Jim Flavin‘s comparisons of human rights abuses between China and America have set me thinking.

I suspect there is something invidious about trying to set up a league table of human rights abusers. In the end it’s the individual who suffers when his or her rights are abused – who are we to sit in judgement on the parity of pain?

Finally how fitting that Iran – another systemic abuser of its people’s human rights – should be the progenitors of an attack on China’s own search site Baidu.

Some clever-dick hacked into the site on Tuesday and covered it with an Iranian flag and the words “Iranian Cyber Army”.

I have had the delightful experience of visiting the piston-less, wire-less, valve-less, transistor-less headquarters of Google UK.

Yes, I’ve been right inside www.google.co.uk. And it is a quite extraordinary experience, verging on cultish. But very benign.

My natural instincts are to be suspicious of large influential organisations. However, Google does not feel suspicious. It is very white. The walls are white, the canteen is white, the crockery is white, the food (of exceptionally high quality and free to every employee) is colourful and delicious.

But the people working there are from every conceivable ethnicity and country in the world. I did not see anybody who even began to approach my own age echelon. Indeed, I think the oldest man I saw might have been 42.

I was there to talk about the changes in the media. It was a daunting challenge because, of course, one knew one was speaking to people who knew far more about new media than I will ever know.

But in a funny sort of way, they were charmed by the primitivity of “life on the road” that I was able to describe. And I think, judging from the considerable reaction I’ve had on email from my new-found friends at Google, they were themselves surprised at the unbelievable pace of change in the last 30 years.

The Forbes world’s billionaires list is out. And let us shed a tear for the haemorrhage in the amount of money they between them control, from $4.4bn to $2.4bn.

This list immediately raises the question of what they do, and what they do for us. You see the Gateses and others in it and immediately one thinks of… Well, what does one think of? One thinks of philanthropy. What enormously generous people these are.

And, of course, to some extent it is true. But this is an America-heavy list. And in the United States tax relief and philanthropy are seamlessly bound together so that giving is intricately interwoven with taking.

Today the founder of Google, Sergey Brin (above), has given a massive sum of dollars to research into Parkinson’s disease – specifically, a gene trial. Would the “authorities” ever have got round to funding it without him? We simply don’t know the answer.

And the question is always there: would society at large be better off if all rich people paid all the taxes they are due and allowed our elected representatives to determine how to spend it?

As we shed a tear for the 30 per cent of billionaires from last year’s table who’ve been jettisoned from the list as a result of the recession, we should pause for a moment and recognise that millions of ordinary people have lost 30 per cent in their house values, in their employment prospects, and in all sorts of other ways.

And to them 30 per cent means infinitely more than it does to those on the Forbes list.