[jimmybot]

I actually had something specifically in mind. Google Taiwan had to fight to get special options onto the search page that could limit searches to Taiwanese websites ( http://www.google.com.tw/ ). Otherwise, most Mandarin language searches would be overwhelmed by results from China. The strong resistance they encountered at the time was that Google insisted on products being rolled out worldwide in a single version, minus minor variations like translations.

It's also a question of ethics in this case. This is about data that Google is directly providing, not simply a matter of ranking or showing/not showing websites in their results. It's not serving the user a purple background because they like purple. Think about another possible case--would it be right for Google to draw Israel as occupied Palestine in countries where the majority of people might hold that point of view?