Top 10 Internet Scandals of All Time

4. The China Syndrome

Several Net giants found themselves on the wrong side of "the Great Firewall" last year as they caught heat for cutting deals with China's Communist regime. Google, for one, announced a new Chinese version of its search engine that is censored by the Beijing government. Search for controversial topics like Falun Gong, and the results will look quite different depending on which side of the Pacific you're on.
But Google declined to roll out Chinese versions of Blogger or Gmail, hoping to avoid the scandal that Yahoo brought upon itself when it turned over subscriber e-mail to the Chinese authorities, an action that resulted in the arrests of three dissidents. In late 2005, Microsoft voluntarily removed the blog of an outspoken Chinese journalist from MSN Spaces. Cisco has also come under fire for selling China the equipment to carefully filter Internet access for its 132 million Netizens. Rather than get cut out of the world's largest emerging market, these firms decided to hold their noses and take the money.