Google doesn't do business in China because they won't agree to the privacy violating terms of doing so, that is at least a $1T principle if you compare it to the amount of hardware and services that Apple sells there.
Sure, but the claim was that they faced public pressure. The reality is likely not that millions of people marched to put pressure on Google, nor to ensure their representatives knew what to do in this situation, but that some powerful people (who happen to be elected representatives, maybe) decided that Google should be dissuaded from this path, and that's what happened.
They faced internal pressure from employees as I remember it. They shutdown their Chinese sites after the PLA was caught hacking Gmail accounts in Hong Kong, but this was when Paige and Sergey were more involved (being from formerly authoritarian communist countries).
You didn’t bother to search, so let me paste the relevant content for you here:
> The Dragonfly project was an Internet search engine prototype created by Google that was designed to be compatible with China's state censorship provisions.
> The public learned of Dragonfly's existence in August 2018, when The Intercept leaked an internal memo written by a Google employee about the project.
> […]
> However, according to employees, work on Dragonfly was still continuing as of March 2019, with some 100 people still allocated to it.
> In July 2019, Google announced that work on Dragonfly had been terminated.
Your comment suggests rank and file had power to shut it down (they didn't: it was the public scrutiny), or that it was shut down in response to happening a decade before it was shut down.
From what I remember the internal pressure was pretty intense, that the story about employees being against it is what the press covered and what caused the public scrutiny. You could claim that employee opinion would have been meaningless without public coverage of that opinion, but that is another argument all together.
The only things that prevented Google from returning to the China market, were public pressure and an employee revolt.
> Google employees are calling on the company to cancel Project Dragonfly, an effort to create a censored search engine in China.
“Many of us accepted employment at Google with the company’s values in mind, including its previous position on Chinese censorship and surveillance, and an understanding that Google was a company willing to place its values above its profits,” an open letter signed by Google employees published Tuesday on Medium says. “After a year of disappointments including Project Maven, Dragonfly, and Google’s support for abusers, we no longer believe this is the case.”
Google’s Chinese search app would have reportedly complied with demands to remove content that the government ruled sensitive and linked users’ searches to their personal phone numbers.
I find this dubious. Google is not known for respecting privacy, and large corporations in general are not known for voluntarily passing on trillion dollar markets on moral grounds. Is there perhaps an alternative explanation that isn't as far fetched?
> They refused to censor the search engine to China’s liking.
Google had no problem with censoring the search results in China. They exited the country after it began hacking into their data centers.
> Since arriving here in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what citizens can read online.
Google linked its decision to sophisticated cyberattacks on its computer systems that it suspected originated in China and that were aimed, at least in part, at the Gmail user accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
Google have a history of censorship in western countries, as evidenced by the scrubbing of all C19 alternative information which didn’t align with TPTB narratives.
Only after they were hacked by China, before that they had no problems with censorship. They also had a plan to return. Doubt there were any principles in play when making decisions on their China operarions
I won’t be surprised if they’ll retry to enter China soon.