[fnid2]

Google leaving China due to "government stuff" is a simple way for them to ease out of a market where they are losing to Baidu.

according to: http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/12/28/googl...

Baidu's market share for search in China was about 77% in the third quarter, up from 75.6% in the second quarter. Google (GOOG), she says, lost share in China, dropping to 17% in the third quarter, from about 19% in the second quarter.

[EricBurnett]

I always hate seeing this argument. Using back of the napkin calculations, that means Google is getting out of China because it's down to 50 million users there. I guess we should expect them to be leaving Canada soon, since they only have about 19 million users here. Not to mention that the number of internet users in China is growing by about 80 million people per year at the moment according to the world bank, of which Google was presumably getting their 17% as well.

[ruslan]

Anybody can point to figures/estimations showing how much Google makes in China and in North America per capita ? I strongly believe that doing business in China is really not worth the associated trouble in Google's case (and in many others too).