There is no ‘risk of being caught messing with an American company’; they mess with American companies all the time. Security-sensitive companies have long known about the risk of espionage (industrial and otherwise) in China and acted appropriately (many security-sensitive companies require you to re-image your laptop before and after going to China, for example, and forbid you from logging into email while you’re there.)

Google’s shareholders don’t matter; their company structure ensures that Larry, Sergei, and Schmidt are the only opinion that matters: http://news.cnet.com/Google-to-defend-dual-class-stock-structure/2100-1030_3-6060691.html and that was explicitly done so that they could advance their corporate values over the interests of the broader class of stockholders.

They *do* have a huge business in China. They’re certainly not a defacto monopoly like they are here, but even the pessimists say they have 25% market share there, and some more recent numbers suggest they are back up to 35%, which (once the whole country gets on line) means the same number of people as in the entire US. No American company that I’m aware of has thrown away even fractions of that kind of market share in China out of principle.

Sorry to argue bit-by-bit here, but I’ve got to actually ‘get some work done’ today ;)

In my previous comment I wrote two simple (and non-contradictory) things:

1. the Google censorship in China has always been limited to the national “.cn” portal, but Chinese people have always been free to use other national portals (and thus experience, for example, the censorship of Google US search results due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – see for example http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-865936.html );

2. you claim that Google is wasting huge business opportunities in China. I beg to disagree, unless solid numbers are provided. And please consider that Google is/was maintaining expensive research and development centers and huge investments in China, and it’s probably the only country in the world where a huge competitor (Baidu) owns the vast majority of the same users and market: are you sure that the remaining market share is worth the investment and costs? Are you sure that Google shareholders would remain silent about the loss of a huge market and the related profits?

I never wrote that “by withdrawiing from China, China will stop hacking Google, reducing China’s security risk” – and in fact I can’t see how withdrawing from China whould reduce the number of hacking attempts against the mailboxes of human rights activists (and that’s one of the reasons that make me skeptic about the real reasons of the Google decision).

Oh, btw: you seem to be sure that the Chinese government is involved in the hacking attempts. But since they could easily monitor human right activists and their computers in their own houses, I don’t see why the government should mess with an American company, and take the risk of being caught…

Either it is hard to use google.com from China (and therefore dissidents will stop using it, and China will stop hacking their accounts) or it is easy to use google.com from China (and therefore it will still be a target for the chinese government, whether or not google.cn is available.)

More generally, this whole notion that ‘google is losing therefore they are getting out’ is crazy. No American business has dominant market share in China, and they are all killing themselves to please that market anyway, because it is so huge and the long-term growth prospects so large.

Furthermore, the “Google censorship in China” issue is overhyped IMHO. The chinese regulations are related to the “.cn” domain and the possibility to make business in the internal chinese market (where Baidu is definitely stronger than Google). When Chinese people want to see the uncensored Google, they just need to type e.g. “www.google.co.uk” instead of “www.google.cn”.

This “Google is different and cares about human rights” campaign just seems to me a publicity stunt, covering the loss of interest in investing in the Chinese market.