Silicon Valley came to the mountains of Switzerland at Davos last week. Was it my imagination or did its leaders look shamefaced?...what happens when business interests clash with ethics? That is occurring in China not only to Google, but to Microsoft and Yahoo and it ought to make Silicon Valley's finest worried. Mr Gates teased Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, at the World Economic Forum in Davos after the latter ran through the company's strained defence of why it was censoring its search service in China...But Microsoft's chairman has little to be proud of. His company shut down the blog of a Chinese activist that the country's government did not like. Quizzed about that at another Davos event, Mr Gates indulged in a bit of relativism himself: it was the price that had to be paid for bringing a liberating technology to China...But internet companies cannot simply shrug off their opportunism in China. Other foreign companies may implicitly provide support to a repressive regime by being there but there are a couple of reasons why the internet giants should be held - and should hold themselves - to higher standards than the rest. The first reason is that the internet industry is regulated far more lightly than many others...In these circumstances, the internet giants ought to tread very carefully. The benefits of an open internet, free from clumsy regulation and inquisitive authorities, have been huge. But they need not last and will be curtailed if the public loses faith in Google and others. China is a vast market but what does it profit an internet company if it gains the whole world and loses its soul?