Sincerely, you're wrong.

GreatFire.org exists to end China's censorship - they have pondered long, researched, and have not missed your point.

China's weakness is they cannot censor where it crimps the economy too much.

Read: Collateral Freedom https://openitp.org/pdfs/CollateralFreedom.pdf

China blocking all Google products would make such a backlash in China that it's not a feasible move for the China government. Just as with Github, too many people would complain about losing $$ in the economy.

Gmail, Android, Chrome, Picasa, Google Drive, Docs, Translate, Maps, Scholar, Books, Earth, AppEngine, Research, Hangouts. Too many Chinese rely on these financially, and in their jobs.

GreatFire.org is right. This is a superb defrocking of censorship that will work.

The real question is why isn't Google doing this.

You've never been to China, have you?

Access to gmail is spotty and unreliable, like most other google services. Android phones connect to Chinese android market and most have alternative chinese only app markets. If google where to stop access to android market, people would get pissed, but switch app-provider.

For the rest, these are barely used services. I don't even think hangouts are accessible, since it's a part of Google+, which is blocked. Maps? Year, it's nice, but so is Baidu maps. Picasa? Which economy is impacted by picasa?

> China's weakness is they cannot censor where it crimps the economy too much. It's brilliant.

While this is true, google is not one of them.

I've been going to China since 1985 (28 years), speak Chinese and Japanese, and read the newspapers fluently in both.

How about Amazon?

To be fair, a number of those are regularly and/or completely blocked in China, e.g. Google Drive[1] and encrypted.google.com[2] completely (if I'm reading those right) and gmail[3] often enough to be notable.

[1] https://zh.greatfire.org/https/drive.google.com

[2] https://zh.greatfire.org/encrypted.google.com

[3] https://zh.greatfire.org/https/mail.google.com

Also, Android in China is completely degoogleified. No Google accounts, no Play, no GMail...

Surely that's a good thing?!

The translation of your link for Gmail says Gmail is (only) 9% blocked in China.

If Gmail didn't work 9% of the time, nobody would use it.

right, which is why I said "often enough to be notable". Nearly 1 out of 10 visits blocked would certainly make use of it difficult. However, almost all of the samples for gmail are colored orange, but google translate doesn't do a great job of translating the legend ("矛盾" -> "Contradiction"?), or at least I'm not sure what that means.

--Gmail, Android, Chrome, Picasa, Google Drive, Docs, Translate, Maps, Scholar, Books, Earth, AppEngine, Research, Hangouts. Too many Chinese rely on these financially, and in their jobs-- google docs, google drive, google videos are already blocked in China, google images is almost useless, as it blocks in the second search, then you have to restart the browser to search another keyword for images ( count until 10 before restart the browser ) and even google search is almost useless in most of China, as it takes too long to return the results (except for the big cities, where it works ok) , same for Gmail, it takes 5 minutes to open, and often never opens, the progress bar just stops in the middle.Again, this is not for big cities, but try to open Gmail out of the urban area of big cities and wait. Lan-houses(cyber cafes) dont open Gmail even in big cities. The impact on economy for completely blocking google will be almost zero. I live in China for 10 years, right now using a ssh to open gmail.

The article specifically mentions China blocking Google.

“Google! Do it! If they don't block you, freedom wins. If they do block you, there will be much more opposition to censorship inside China and the system will be forced to change, thus freedom wins too!”

The article describes how the their (small?) group of activists is willing to "bet the house", and that the potential outcome could include Google being blocked.

It's nice that they're willing to see Google blocked, but they're not actually giving up anything if that happens. Google on the other hand is a public company and has a lot more to lose if they're blocked. What would the shareholders say to Google risking the ad revenue from Chinese Internet users? And they're already fighting for marketshare with Baidu ... they could end up losing enough ground to never recover.

The activists might find that tack is a far better way to proceed. Google could easily just say "switching to HTTPS is in accordance with our policies throughout the rest of the world and it's (one way) to protect Chinese users from spying by the NSA (and others). Actively redirecting blocked requests to cached pages would on the other hand offend the Chinese government and would signal Google's true intent.

If you're going to be activists, you need to have a much better understanding of corporate motivations as well as become much more tuned into politics.

Sincerely, that's not correct.

GreatFire.org is at the cutting-edge of research (including from Harvard, Princeton, and many software engineers globally and in China) to end the censorship in China. GreatFire.org is on the front lines of solving censorship.

This idea is new research that works.

Google has a preponderant position in search in 125 nations, and is not hurting that much from retreating to HongKong. Baidu can't even get a foothold going in Japan.

On the other hand, the blunt mercantilism which keeps Google, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook out of China stands to weaken by applying this excellent idea.

Google actually may benefit by responding adroitly to the intentional evisceration of Google by the Chinese government.

The beauty of this research is that it probes a blind spot in China policy not easily remedied, while hitting the one place China cares about - money and the national economy.

I won't dispute that GreatFire.org is at the cutting edge of research, I just think the solution is naive. And you haven't addressed my real point which is that they're giving up nothing (certainly nothing of their own) if Google gets kicked out of China but you've conceded my point that there's an economic reason Google has behaved the way it has.

All I was stating is that part one of the two-part proposal (encrypting all traffic) should be done on it's own - that providing access to blocked content took Google from a passive position to an active one. Most of the students at Tiananmen Square didn't risk getting run over by a tank, but we still talk about the fact they had the courage to rally. If GreatFire.org wants to decides to take on the tank, that's fine, but it's not fair to push Google in front of the tank ... that's their decision to make.

P.S. The article also discusses Google's "Don't be evil" model ... I agree that it would be admirable to also try to abate evil where they can.

P.P.S. After watching the Matt Damon video in another posting, I'm reconsidering blind obedience myself!

We're not giving up anything of our own, but we really have nothing to give up. If Google ignores this and life goes on, life will go on for us, too. We will continue to do what we are doing. If I could do what we suggest Google does, then I would. But we are not Google. They have the power to do this, they can do it now - we should not have to wait for ten years. Eric Schmidt is saying today that Russia is taking cues from China on web censorship - this idea can stop them, too. It can stop all of them.

I think we're agreeing ... and I think what you're standing up for is admirable, so I'll stand along side you. I also have nothing to give up, so that doesn't mean much - other than we're kindred spirits, perhaps with a real libertarian bent.

Who is funding you?

Why are you tackling censorship in China first and not any other country, like your own?

We are Chinese but we are now considering expanding.

> How is the author overlooking the most obvious course of action the Chinese government could take?

He didn't overlook it, he addressed it specifically. Read the article.