Google did actually make a stand here a decade back, and have been blocked ever since. The last straw for them at the time, however, wasn't political pressure to make some islands look bigger or censor some websites, but espionage.

Aren't they unavailable because they specifically didn't cave though?

No. They’re unavailable because they refused to go back into the market after China got caught using espionage. Were it not for that, it’s very possible Google would have caved; we don’t know how that would have fallen. It’s convenient they didn’t have to answer that, but not because they didn’t cave.

It’s not true though. They were under tremendous pressure to adapt their product and change it for the ccp (with censorship for example). They were constantly resisting by introducing workarounds. Until the espionnage thing when they said "fuck it, we’re done". I remember very well: I was living in China at the time.

Absence of evidence doesn't seem as definitive as you're making it here, but it's worth noting that we have two counterfactuals we can use as a prior: Bing still works in China and Yahoo only pulled out last summer, in spite of public espionage and hacking incidents.

> Bing still works in China

If by ‘works’ you mean it allows searches that China finds acceptable.

> Google Search for example was heavily modified for the Chinese market.

Do you mean something other than Project Dragonfly, which was terminated?

Google had been running search in China up till 2010, and it has been censoring its results according to Chinese government wishes. Then, Google found out that China has been hacking them, got angry and left.

Leaky censoring, you could still find the banned stuff. Sergey Brin was very anti-authoritarian given his background, and Google's decision to leave China was far more principled than "we have no choice". They were given a choice to comply with onerous government restrictions and decided to say no.

(And yes, the "old" Google of the Brin area is gone. I also don't think Steve Jobs would kowtow to the CCP and compromise Apple like Cook is doing. The post 2010-era is now run on bean-counter ethics)

Yes, you’re totally right. When I was growing up in 2000s, Google was the epitome of cool, and I dreamed of working there. Then, when I worked there in mid-to-late 2010s, it was not at all what it had been before.

It’s a little bit more nuanced, China hacked Google, so Google stopped censoring search results, then China banned Google.

They still maintain a rather large office in the university neighbourhood in Beijing. They even moved to bigger one few years back and there was a fire [0]. In Andrew Blum’s book Google is quotes to even “have left a couple of boxes there”, referring to network equipment. They have not really ‘left’.

[0] https://www.thebeijinger.com/blog/2018/12/13/large-fire-erup...