So Google has agreed to censor its web search results in China. No Tiananmen Square, no independent Taiwan. No Gmail, no blogs.

It sucks that Google has to do this, but I think, all things considered, this falls on the right side of the OK line. Here’s why.

There’s definitely an OK line when it comes to ignoring basic rights in the name of global expansion. For example, I would be outraged if Google agreed to censor out stories about successful business women or members of a particular religion just to get some deal working in some far away country that doesn’t share our views about equality and religious freedom.

On the other hand, I don’t know that the Chinese people have voiced any desire to avoid reading about Tiananmen Square or Taiwan. To the contrary, they are being denied that right by the government. The top down origin of this restriction is, at least for me, the difference maker. While Google can’t allow its Chinese users to read about these things, it can give them something- a Chinese Google- they don’t already have. Maybe by becoming a player in the Chinese internet, Google can, over time, be a force for positive change.

Most of the efforts leading to this positive change will ultimately have to come from within China, not without. So I’m not bothered by Google’s decision to give the Chinese people something as opposed to nothing.

Plus, as Mathew Ingram points out, Google is not the first major U.S. internet player to make concessions in the name of Chinese expansion.

To get carried away and claim that this somehow represents Google’s transformation into Darth Vader is simply naive. Americans sometimes seem to believe that everyone has to start acting like us immediately and that anyone who doesn’t is, well, evil. That’s just not the way the world works. The important thing is to seek positive change and avoid going backwards. Google’s China game is certainly not a giant step forward, but being realistic and trying to work within the system is not going backwards either.

We can draw lots of lines in family discussions at the dinner table and in newspapers and blogs, but positive change sometimes requires compromise. Once you draw the wrong line, the conversation is over and the battle lost. At least this way Google lives, in China, to hopefully fight another day.

Henry Blodget has a post about Google’s stock price that brings back some bad memories from the late nineties and early oughts.

Back in the nineties, I became a great investor like everyone else who bought tech stocks. I made some nutty (paper) returns for a few years, got quoted in a few investing articles, was selected for SmartMoney Magazine’s Investor Panel and got on the cover of Money Magazine. Then I lost all of the paper profit when the tech bubble burst. I also lost the deal to sell ACCBoards.Com for seven figures and a bunch of stock, but that’s another sad story.

I think Google rocks. I really do. But it’s about more than rocking; it’s about making money. And Google trades at a PE Ratio in the hundreds. Back in the day, I would have thought about taking a small position just to join the fun and see what happens. Not today. I learned my lesson.

Some of the stocks I can think of off the top of my head that I rode all the way to (or near) zero are Exodus, Enron, MCI, 360 Networks and JDS Uniphase. Yes, I made a lot of money on Cisco, Applied Materials and eBay (I still own those at a very low split-adjusted price), but it wasn’t all that long ago that my losses on the bad buys were greater than my profit on the good ones. Buying stocks is like playing golf: one bad pick won’t kill you, but three bad holes will. If you make a handful of triple bogies, it doesn’t really matter how you do on the rest of the holes.

I think Google rocks, but I’m sitting this one out.