If they lose their legal basis for owning a .cn domain, google.cn would cease to exist, or if it continued to exist, it would be illegal, and doing anything blatantly illegal in China puts their employees at serious risk.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Google's real threat to China is not that it will leave the country. It's that it will embarrass China and damage its national reputation as a place to do business.
To have a .cn domain, you have to be a registered business. You have to prove your site is legal.
When Google went into China, there were some people who said they shouldn't compromise at all - that it is very bad for human rights to do so. But there were other people, particularly Chinese people, who said they were glad Google had gone in.
While Google no longer has a search engine operation inside China, it has maintained a large presence in Beijing and Shanghai focused on research and development, advertising sales, and mobile platform development.
If China wants to be a constructive, active player in the world economy, it's got to respect intellectual property rights or it makes it pretty impossible to do business with them.
Clearly Google is searching for a way to do business in China that avoids them sending someone to jail over an e-mail.
China's Web has grown away from just duplicating services from the U.S.
Like it or not, Google and the Chinese government are stuck in a tense, long-term relationship, and can look forward to more high-stakes shadow-boxing in the netherworld of the world's most elaborate system of censorship.
If an Internet company steals content, they shut it down. And let me tell you, Apple France, Yahoo France or Google France, none of them have gone out of business.
Google attempted to run a search engine in China, and they ended up giving up.