I agree, but they have clearly not met the standard for what China needs. I mean Zuck literally was jogging around Beijing 10 years ago trying to build goodwill to get in, and it was Google that made the decision to exit the market.

> They have large teams globally that do just that.

You are spreading the misinformation. Google can't keep up with the censorship shit and gave up as stated in their official blog

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...

> a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results

> We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn

People seem to forget Google had a notorious record a terrible customer service. And China always demand more.

In China. They obviously run censorship globally in every country that demands it, it's just that China's demands were worse than everyone else's and they decided it's not worth the effort.

Google did everything right in terms of local execution to get all the required licensure and top talent, and then Sergey threw it away.

Both founders having grown up in communist block countries supposedly had something to do with their aversion. At least that’s what I heard (was working for MS china back then).

Larry grew up in Michigan... a communist country?

(As I heard it, the legend is mostly attributed to Sergey pushing for it, and every time I've heard Eric talk about it it felt there was some disdain there, so I would agree with you that Larry was probably convinced also, otherwise Sergey alone wouldn't have pulled it off.)

And the worst part of a Communism is "planned economy", e.g. the state decides which app/service is good or not.

The US banning a foreign-owned service from operating on its soil (when that foreign country bans many US-based services from operating on their soil) is not a "planned economy". Please don't use low-effort, bad-faith arguments.

There was the PLA hacking gmail accounts in Hong Kong also, which supposedly was why Google stopped playing nice in the first place.

It's a rogue state after all.

Surely planned economy was the worst part and not repressions and millions dead under red boot.

the reason behind millions of death because the grain rationing system leaving little to none food for peasants in the 1960s, yeah it's still economical issue.

Bad things happen when the state controls everything.