charliesmith

No - they are losing market share in search (3%) and if they keep their current course will continue to lose. The opportunity here is to gain one billion customers (well, 600 million now), by freeing the internet in China and hence at least making substantial money on ad sales.

We are Chinese but we are now considering expanding.

That is a valid point and past Google blog posts have alluded to this danger. I made this point in the longer blog post which appears on our web site, but not in The Guardian article. http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/new-approach-to-chi...

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.

In the past we have strongly suggested that all sites switch to HTTPS. If this happened on "World Global HTTPS Awareness Day", i.e., at about the same time, then I think China would be faced with some tough decisions.

How about Amazon?

You might be interested in the post we wrote about the Github MITM attack in China: https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2013/jan/china-github-and-man-...