Lie down with the dogs â€¦

There's an old axiom that says, "If you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas."

Years ago, my good friends at Google decided to lie down with dogs anyway – despite my warnings.

Like many corporate giants of the past, Google chose to get in bed with the totalitarian Chinese government – agreeing to censor search results to please its hosts in Beijing.

It was strictly a business decision, Google explained. Executives even said it was a hand-wringing choice. But, as you know, the almighty dollar – or, in this case, the almighty yuan – can be very persuasive.

But now, years later, Google is having second thoughts.

It seems the world's largest search engine is threatening to pull out of China as a result of a sophisticated computer network attack that could only have been orchestrated by the government.

Google officials said they have evidence that "a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts" of Chinese human-rights activists.

David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal officer of Google, said the company is now reviewing the feasibility of its operations in China.

The company has also concluded it is no longer willing to censor its search results in China's version of Google. Over the next few weeks officials plan to discuss with the government how it may operate "an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all."

"We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China," said Drummond.

I hate to say I told you so, but Google could have spared itself all this grief by merely listening to me, since it had failed to heed its own corporate conscience.

Good grief! Google should send me a big fat check for the free consultations I have offered publicly over the years.

I even devoted a complete chapter of my book "Stop the Presses! The Inside Story of the New Media Revolution" to the topic of Google and its appeasement of evil in China.

But there's a bigger story here than just Google.

It's a story about corporate America's misguided and immoral accommodations with despotism and tyranny in China.

It's also a story about the U.S. government's willingness to accede to Beijing's every wish.

It's also a story about how wrongheaded were all those people who claimed China would grow out of its repressive nature if only we cooperated with it and did business openly with it.

It wasn't just the adolescent executives at Google who guessed wrong. The entire American government and corporate establishment did.

China's economy may have improved as a result of all this cooperation – but its human-rights record is as appalling as ever.

So we chose to buy the cheap and inferior goods, poisoned as they might be, malfunctioning as they might be, dangerous as they might be, and leveraged our future as a nation on a mountain of debt.

Are we better off?

Are the Chinese people better off?

The answer to both questions is unequivocally "no."

I hope Google is serious about pulling out of China.

It's not going to change the beast. It's not going to get rid of the fleas if it continues to lie down with the dogs.

The only honorable and righteous choice is to get out.

And that's something other American corporations need to do, too.

And it's something a future American government is going to need to consider as well.

Those cyberattacks on Google are nothing but a warm-up act for what's coming down the road from the brutes in Beijing.