Google and an unnamed large country in Asia... yawn

I'm surprised that anyone thinks that Google is making a bad business decision by leaving that large Asian country that I will not name here.  My own take on it is that the censorship and hacking aside, there just isn't much point in them staying there, at least under the current system.  It isn't that Google's product isn't competitive.  Rather, I seriously doubt that the government there will ever let any foreign company dominate in media or internet.  Baidu dominates the market there not because it has a better product, but because over the last few years, every time Google showed any signs of gaining market share, the government threw sand into the gears by claiming they were disseminating porn or doing something else that was reprehensible.  If for some odd reason Bing ever takes off there, the same thing will happen to Microsoft, and Steve Balmer or whoever is running things will find out that their willingness to comply with censorship requests has bought them absolutely nothing.  Google wasn't making serious money there and more importantly I doubt it would ever be given the chance.

I don't think any other media or internet company has made much money there, indeed media companies aren't really even allowed in.  Yahoo has pretty much pulled out because its efforts were largely unsuccessful.  Rupert Murdoch's venture was a debacle.  So I think Google is doing the smart thing.  They realized that they would never be allowed to make much money or dominate the market, and meanwhile to add insult to injury they had to comply with ridiculous censorship requests and suffer from hacking attacks, so what is the point in saying?  There seems to be this idea that Google made a terrible decision because if only they played ball and found some way to stay and 'understood the market', sooner or later the floodgates would open and the cash would simply start pouring in.  That is silly.  They will never be allowed to dominate the market or make a lot of money there, at least not in the absence of some really dramatic changes in government policy.  It is possible for foreign companies to make money in that country, and certainly some are very successful, but as far as I know none of them are in the media, entertainment, or internet business.

My own take on this is that the censorship issue is a sideshow.  Most people there aren't bothering to search for information on sensitive topics of the sort that are featured in the Western media.  Instead, the government is worried about other services that allow unmonitored connections between individuals like Twitter, Facebook, and so forth, because it is afraid of a color revolution or other spontaneous uprising like they had in Iran and some former Soviet Republics.  I notice now that even Google Docs and Dropbox seem to be interfered with.  To the extent that Google continues to embed social networking features like Buzz into its services that resemble Twitter and Facebook, I am guessing the government will start interfering with Gmail and related services, because it doesn't want to allow anything along those lines that it doesn't have the capability to monitor.

I am glad Google woke up and realized that they were on a fool's errand and being played for suckers.  There doesn't seem to be much evidence of a 'first-mover' advantage for companies investing there, they're far better off sitting things out until the situation relaxes.