What does following local laws of one specific country have to do with the open global internet? You do realize that Chinese internet is already behind a firewall, and is not open, right?
> Google went out of it's way to protect Chinese dissidents
And we have absolutely facts about what they were working on with Dragonfly, except leaks from a source which was very clearly biased against the project. For all we know, they were coming up with new tech that allowed them to provide services to Chinese citizen while still protecting them.
That to me makes much more sense as to why they were considering re-entering, than the baseless "they were only doing it for the money" reasoning.
Why are you doing PR for them?
That's simply not Google's choice. The people with guns and tanks in China decide that. Judge Google by what they do the Internet where they have power, with browser tech and HTTP standards and AMP and DNS and YouTube and whatever.
All you've done is framed the situation in a way that makes it seem like Google isn't responsible for it's own actions.
Then Google should have nothing to do with it. Otherwise they are not supportive of 'a free and open internet', but are actively supporting a close, censored and controlled internet.
It's pretty simple.
I don't see why Google wouldn't actually prefer if China didn't have such draconian restrictions. At the very least it would reduce their regulatory compliance work in China drastically.
Pointing out the actions of other companies, the good things Google has done, or the fact that they censor content in most countries doesn't negate that fact. Those are just mediocre argumentative tactics to try and downplay a public relations disaster.
We're not even dealing with the same Google from 9 years ago. Here's some good reading for everyone about how Google went out of it's way to protect Chinese dissidents and refused to comply with the Chinese government. Now they're doing the opposite:
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...