Google weighs leaving China

Conventional wisdom has evolved that China's 1.3 billion consumers make up a market much too big to leave. But now, Google, the worldwide search-engine giant, may be testing that mind-set.

A week after threatening to quit China, Google reported a blockbuster net income of nearly $2 billion, or 30 percent of revenues, for the fourth quarter, suggesting the world's leading search-engine firm would remain a powerful, valuable, highly profitable media company even if it had to abandon China's burgeoning Internet market.

"We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results" on Google's Chinese-language search engine, Google.cn, the company's chief legal officer, David Drummond, said, firing the opening gun. "We recognize this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn and, potentially, our offices in China."