Recently, I spent several days talking to Wong and her colleagues at the so-called Googleplex, which has the feeling of a bucolic and extraordinarily well-financed theme camp. As we sat around a conference table, they told me about their debates as they wrestled with hard cases like the dispute in Turkey, as well as the experiences that have informed their thinking about free speech. Walker, the general counsel, wrote for The Harvard Crimson as an undergraduate and considered becoming a journalist before going into law; McLaughlin, the head of global public policy, became a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society after working on the successful Supreme Court challenge to part of the federal Communications Decency Act. And Wong, a soft-spoken and extremely well organized woman, has a joint degree in law and journalism from Berkeley and told me she aspired to be a journalist as a child because of her aunt, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times.

Image Thailand Credit... Siggi Eggertsson

I asked Wong what was the best analogy for her role at Google. Was she acting like a judge? An editor? “I don’t think it’s either of those,” she said. “I definitely am not trying to pass judgment on anything. I’m taking my best guess at what will allow our products to move forward in a country, and that’s not a judge role, more an enabling role.” She stressed the importance for Google of bringing its own open culture to foreign countries while still taking into account local laws, customs and attitudes. “What is the mandate? It’s ‘Be everywhere, get arrested nowhere and thrive in as many places as possible.’ ” So far, no Google employees have been arrested on Wong’s watch, though some have been detained.

When Google was founded, 10 years ago, it wasn’t at all obvious whether the proprietors of search engines would obey the local laws of the countries in which they did business — and whether they would remove links from search results in response to requests from foreign governments. This began to change in 2000, when a French Jew surfed a Yahoo auction site to look for collections of Nazi memorabilia, which violated a French law banning the sale and display of anything that incites racism. After a French judge determined that it was feasible for Yahoo to identify 90 percent of its French users by analyzing their I.P. addresses and to screen the material from the users, he ordered Yahoo to make reasonable efforts to block French users from accessing the prohibited content or else to face fines and the seizure of income from Yahoo’s French subsidiary. In January 2001, Yahoo banned the sale of Nazi memorabilia on its Web sites.

The Yahoo case was a landmark. It made clear that search engines like Google and Yahoo could be held liable outside the United States for indexing or directing users to content after having been notified that it was illegal in a foreign country. In the United States, by contrast, Internet service providers are protected from most lawsuits involving having hosted or linked to illegal user-generated content. As a consequence of these differing standards, Google has considerably less flexibility overseas than it does in the United States about content on its sites, and its “information must be free” ethos is being tested abroad.

For example, on the German and French default Google search engines, Google.de and Google.fr, you can’t find Holocaust-denial sites that can be found on Google.com, because Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany and France. In the wake of the Yahoo decision, Google decided to comply with governmental requests to take down links on its national search engines to material that clearly violates national laws. (In the interest of disclosure, however, Google has agreed to report all the links it takes down in response to government demands to chillingeffects.com, a Web site run by Harvard’s Berkman Center that keeps a record of censored online materials.)

Of course, not every overseas case presents a clear violation of national law. In 2006, for example, protesters at a Google office in India demanded the removal of content on Orkut, the social networking site, that criticized Shiv Sena, a hard-line Hindu political party popular in Mumbai. Wong eventually decided to take down an Orkut group dedicated to attacking Shivaji, revered as a deity by the Shiv Sena Party, because it violated Orkut terms of service by criticizing a religion, but she decided not to take down another group because it merely criticized a political party. “If stuff is clearly illegal, we take that down, but if it’s on the edge, you might push a country a little bit,” Wong told me. “Free-speech law is always built on the edge, and in each country, the question is: Can you define what the edge is?”