The defenses are not unsound. Under any rational business sense, it would be insane to expect one of the world's largest internet companies to stay out of the world's largest internet market, especially when many of Google's American rivals happily operate under that government's intrusive rules. China is Apple's third-largest market, and Microsoft and Amazon both offer a host of services there.

But wasn't standing apart supposed to be the hallmark of Google's Googliness? Leaving China was the kind of unorthodox decision the search company once revelled in; a move that sacrificed financial prosperity for the moral high ground, that showed employees and customers that Google, with its planet-swallowing mission to organise all of life's information, was motivated by something deeper than financial ambition.

Activists for online freedoms worry that Google's return would have dangerous real-world consequences, perhaps accelerating a great new wave of online restrictions in China and elsewhere. But the most lasting impact might be in how we would have to reimagine what kind of company Google was and what it stood for.

It is hard to see how going back to China would be anything other than a terrific comedown, the most telling act of a company that, day by day, has come to resemble the utterly conventional corporation it once vowed never to become.

"If Google wants to be judged like any other global company, that's fine," said Ben Wizner, director of the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. "They should just say so; that their principal obligation is to their shareholders and their bottom line. But that has not been the rhetoric coming out of Google, and I think it's fair to judge them by the standards they have set for themselves."

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In a statement, a Google spokesman said that "we don't comment on speculation about future plans." But the company's leaders have disputed the idea that returning to China would be a moral reversal. At last week's staff meeting, Pichai suggested that returning to China would be in accord with the vision the company had in 2006, when it first agreed to censor results to accommodate Beijing.

At the time, the company said in a blog post that "filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission" but added, "Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world's population, however, does so far more severely."

There are other factors behind Google's potential reversal. The internet has changed a great deal since 2010, and the company's executives have increasingly come to see their decision to leave China as rash, naïve and ultimately counterproductive.

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Google's decision was set in motion by a Chinese hack into its services that was meant to uncover dissidents and spies. The attack shocked and angered Google's founders. In interviews, Brin, who was born in the Soviet Union, compared the Chinese government to the "totalitarian forces" that had shaped his youth. He and other executives suggested that taking a stand in China might set a kind of red line for repressive regimes elsewhere.

"I think that in the long term, they are going to have to open," Brin said.

Since then, China's rules have only hardened, while a host of other governments have stepped up efforts to police speech online.

Now even many democratic governments are adopting stringent curbs on online speech. For instance, in Europe, a "right to be forgotten" rule has forced Google and other search engines to remove results that are judged to invade people's privacy, and more rules governing hate speech and propaganda are in the works. Meanwhile, Edward Snowden's leaks showed that the US and British governments have also hacked large internet companies, including Google.

"This argument makes me very sad: The world is becoming more like China, so therefore we might as well be in China," said Rebecca MacKinnon, an internet freedom advocate at New America, a think tank.

She said that advocates of free speech and human rights had long found Google to be an ally in their efforts, and that a reversal in China would be regarded as a major defeat.

"I wrote a book where I warned that China is Exhibit A for how authoritarian governments adapt to the internet and then begin to change the internet," MacKinnon said. "And if companies like Google are now throwing in the towel and saying, 'Well, that's where the internet is going' and 'If you can't beat 'em, join 'em'— well, that's deeply troubling."

Sure, it's early, and Google's plans are not clear. There remains the possibility that Google will think of some completely non-traditional way to satisfy China's censors without losing its soul.

But that seems unlikely. The more plausible conclusion is the more obvious one: Google took on China, and Google lost.

"Make no mistake," said Michael Posner, a professor of ethics and finance at New York University's Stern School of Business. "This will be a huge victory for the Chinese government and anyone else who wants to severely restrict the internet."

New York Times