On the heels of last week's Internet Governance Forum in Athens, an event that yielded some memorable statements, I thought it might be worth pondering a situation infested with unroosted chickens: Google's recent purchase of goliath Internet video-sharing site YouTube. Google has had its share of PR trouble from China in the past year. This hasn't come from inside China, where Google's main problem has been how to win market share from rampaging Baidu, but from the US and Europe where critics have lambasted it for knuckling under the Chinese censorship regime. Could the purchase of YouTube upset Google's delicate balancing act between activists and the Chinese Government?

Do Jingjing and Chacha have their eyes on YouTube?

China has it's own raft of video-sharing sites and has no immediate need for YouTube. Whether for copyright issues or government sensitivity concerns, Google didn't even bother to make its own, less-successful Google Video site functional in China. I'd wager that YouTube China isn't on the cards anytime soon, either.

But trouble might still arise from the global YouTube site. The problem is that YouTube is loaded with material calculated to annoy the Chinese Government. Search YouTube for "Tian'anmen Square" for a demonstration. As anyone who uses Blogspot, the BBC or, until recently Wikipedia, knows, the Chinese Government's standard reaction is to block sites that have too much objectionable content. Many seasoned China Internet watchers are surprised that YouTube has stayed under the radar for as long as it has. "A matter of time", was how one recently described the potential blocking of YouTube.

Here's hoping that he and I are both proved wrong. Among other things, the popularity of local video-sharing sites may deflect attention from YouTube. But what if we're not wrong, and the Chinese Government does block YouTube? When YouTube was Chad and Steve's goofy independent site, that wouldn't have been a big deal. Now that it's part of the Google media empire, it could be a very big deal. It wouldn't affect Google's business much. But if China blocks YouTube and Google is seen to acquiesce, it will as well as annoy YouTube users in China, give free speech advocates an all-new stick to beat Google with. If you think Google has forgotten the tarring it received over Google.cn, you're dreaming. And if Google is ahead of the game, it is already planning for such a possibility.

More insidious would be if the Chinese Government asked (or told) Google/YouTube to filter content requested from Chinese IP addresses. This is a bit of a conspiracy theory, and it certainly hasn't happened yet. But Google's investment in China gives the Chinese Government some leverage, and applying some selective filtering would be lower profile than simply blocking the whole site. But self-censorship of Google.cn was what got Google in trouble earlier this year and it seems unlikely that it would tempt fate again. Also, any such filtering would be hard to implement and porous, at least until native video-searching technology gets much better.

Meanwhile, China's own filtering techniques are getting more sophisticated all the time. Where once whole sites were blocked, now it's often just specific pages or queries with sensitive keywords. With video-sharing growing more popular, bright minds are considering how to make video search more effective. The problem is that the same things that make searching more effective, by improving the ability to discern certain kinds of content among the noise, also make censorship more surgical, and thus, more attractive. The more subtle people can be about controlling information, the more likely they are to do so.

Dangerous days, perhaps.

Related: My fellow CNET Asia blogger Shashank Tripathi on the implications of GoogTube for Korea.