Indirect prior restraint is a well understood phenomenon and in fact is expressly forbidden for example in Section 13.3 of the American Convention of Human Rights (The US is party to this treaty).

I also object the comparison between this case and the French attempt to prohibit Nazi memorabilia in Yahoo. The latter case was a conflict between European Hate Speech laws and your First Amendment protection. It was the conflict between two rights that are valued different by both societies.

But that is not the case here. China doesn’t believe in Human Rights, China doesn’t believe in free speech and, as result, a huge portion of humanity can’t exercises basic rights. If the this alleged conduct is granted protection then the Chinas, the Venezuelas and the Russias of the world will know what to do: compel a local search engine to censor results and prohibit all other search engines.

What we can do, what the US Courts can do, is to hamper the expansion of this kind of services oversea. If a search engines censors results on behalf of a government well then good luck trying to receive advertisement dollars from US companies.