They could. Do you know that's the case? China allows a lot of foreign investments and to think that the only reason is to further their censorship is silly.
And to think that Google would never submit to Chinese censorship in earnest is naive. Yahoo![1], Google, Microsoft, Cisco, AOL, Skype, and Nortel all willingly partook in aiding the censorship apparatus. Yahoo! even went so far as to out journalists and political targets for the Chinese government. Why wouldn't Google do the same?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Yahoo!#Work_in_th...
Well AOL, Skype, and Nortel don't really exist as independent entities anymore. Microsoft already censors Skype globally (for profanity) the last I checked. Unfortunately censorship in other countries outside of China doesn't seem to get as much attention, but none of those tinpot dictatorship seem to have any trouble getting their hands on censorship technology from the west.
That Google already went down the road of developing a censorship platform with Dragonfly reveals their willingness to aid in government censorship.
The first news story I came a across searching (it seems fairly unbiased): https://m.sfgate.com/technology/dotcommentary/article/Cisco-...
I am not the kind of person to swing the morality flag pretty much ever, but if you don’t see what’s wrong with this, then I don’t know what else to say.
As for the moral flag, I think in context of Sino-US topics, that ship has sailed long ago. It's more useful to contextualize these decisions in a geopolitical / great powers competition lense. Having Google in China is good soft power opportunity for the US. Chinese people are eager for a baidu alternative. I'm not going to pretend that more engagement with China is going to lead to liberalization in the short-term, but I do think it goes a long way towards preventing future hostilities. And I think google being incentivized to operate in China and becoming proficient in bridging the Chinese-open web is a net good.
Even in the example you linked, Yahoo! said "it must respect the laws of governments in jurisdictions where it is operating." How is complying with this different than complying with a U.S. Government subpoena?
Unless the user clicks the little down arrow next to the URL, which opens the popup menu with "Cached".
And even if that were also censored, the titles, URLs and the first couple of lines of text returned by Google would speak volumes about what's going on. Imagine googling Tiananmen and getting page after page of search results which all turn out to be inaccessible. What would that tell you?
A more pertinent question is how many Chinese users would gladly browse the internet through Google's cache, if it were available to them.
A fair guess is a number at least as large as the number of Chinese users who used to browse the internet through VPNs before the government cracked down on those (nearly 1 in 3 of all Chinese internet users, according to [1], i.e. hundreds of millions).
> Splitting hairs over cache vs. linking the dead website is ignoring the point.
The point, which you appear to have missed, is that you can't expect the censorship to work as implied by the statement I responded to. Google wouldn't be allowed to simply serve up the same search results as outside China. It would have to remove them entirely.
[1] https://www.goldenfrog.com/blog/china-cracks-down-on-vpn-use...
Are you asking how censorship and subpoenas are different?