Comment by joshuaissac
15 hours ago
> Google was eating the lunch of everything in China and the CCP, in response, made it essentially impossible for them to operate.
Google was operating in China until 2010 when they got banned because they stopped censoring search results. Other Western search engines like Bing continue operate in China.
They also got their source code stolen by Chinese state hackers. The word "hostile" doesn't begin to describe their experience operating on the mainland.
Completely tangential, but from personal experience, the performance of Google Search had been degraded for at least 2 years prior, so when it was banned it was already mostly useless anyway.
GMail continued for a few years after that - I'm not even sure if it was ever actually banned, or just suffered the same fate (death by a thousands timeouts).