[sailormoon]

That is utter hyperbole. Google never had the "freedom of speech for ~1.3 billion people" to trade. They do not and probably never will have anything like that kind of power. I am far from a Google fanboy but if you're going to criticise them, please keep it reasonable.

[btmorex]

That is reasonable. I'm simply asking them to not do business with a repressive government. Maybe, you don't think freedom of speech is important, but I do.

As for what kind of effect they could have: Google is an internationally recognized brand that is most certainly known in China (even without being the dominant search engine). Refusing to do business with China would be hard for the state-run media to explain away.

Of course, I think a lot of people really, really want to believe that Google is different from every single other multinational organization that has ever existed. It's not.

[nicolas_t]

Facebook and Twitter are internationally recognized brand that are blocked in China... Explaining that away is no problem for the Chinese government.

I think the difference between your point of view and my point of view is that I don't see things as completely black...

China is a repressive government and freedom of speech is not allowed there but it's certainly better than it was during the cultural revolution and I think it'll get better...

Now, as someone who lived in China before Google decided to move in the chinese market I can tell you that it was a great news to see them move... Before they were intermitently blocked by the Chinese firewall, a lot of queries were blocked so access to good search engines was not very good...

After Google moved to China, well they had to censor some of the results out but then they would point it out, and connection and access to google was much better...

So for me, it was a net benefit to see google move in China, and I hope that them moving out won't result in their being blocked again...

[btmorex]

Google has ~24 billion in revenue. Twitter is harder to pinpoint but from the sources I've seen it's far less than 50 million. Facebook is somewhere around 400-550 million.

I guess my point is that they aren't even in the same stratosphere. Twitter and Facebook may be international recognized (and clearly I should have differentiated here), but they aren't in any way equivalent to a behemoth like Google.

[nicolas_t]

Well they aren't the equivalent in term of revenues but Twitter, Facebook and Youtube (also banned in China after having been allowed at the beginning) are all as well known as Google to the average user...

Apart from that, Google's revenue doesn't give them any leverage on the Chinese government, mostly because they wouldn't ever back down on censoring as it would mean losing face...