China. Searching 'tiananmen square' or 'tank' man' won't show any traces of those events.
There are people in support of companies fighting and breaking current law if they feel that a certain law does not serve the people. We have censorship in this case. Google is massive company with a ubiquitous name synonymous for web search. What if Google complies with local law without pushback, because they understand that a lot of people would be lost without their service. Hear me out:
Most every user here and probably most people 40 or younger from developed nations understands that Google is a company name. However, I claim (no citation) that a non-trivial portion of the world population thinks that the only place to do a web search is Google's website/search bar. I further claim that a non-trivial amount of people do not know that they could navigate a browser to Wikipedia by going to wikipedia.org rather than by typing wikipedia in the bar, loading search results, and clicking the direct link. Ergo Google being shut down in country would mean that a non-trivial portion of that country's population would think that there is no way to search the web for information. It would also mean that a segment of that userbase would also think that the entirety of the Internet is broken.
Without going full Godwin's Law here: history is full of cases where "following the laws" has led to systems and behavior that most people would now consider appalling. I personally think it is always reasonable to ask: at what point does following the law itself become immoral?
There's no clear answer to this, of course. Chinese censorship and DMCA takedown requests fall far short of genocide, slavery, war atrocities, etc. on the "yeah, let's not do this" scale. Censorship sits in a murky area of ethics / morality. After all: we censor things like child pornography that we consider to be morally offensive, and most Western democracies have much stronger hate speech laws than the US. (There's a similar "murky area" line of reasoning around DMCA takedown requests: what about fair use? What is lost when regulatory capture prevents materials from entering the public domain on any kind of reasonable time scale? etc.)
Nor does it have any effect on the argument here. Google did it in the recent past in China, they do the same thing in the US for politically undesirable content today, and Baidu continues doing it in China. The fact is that we live in an information age, and access to information is gated by the major players. This in turn literally determines what people can learn and what ideas are seen as socially acceptable or not. This amount of propaganda and censorship power is unprecedented.
Google is currently censoring gun purchase related searches in the US, and there's no law requiring them to do it. That should make it quite clear that they have both the capacity and the desire to manipulate public opinion through censorship.
I guess you mean searching for "Tiananmen square" in China It seems to me it's the Chinese government censoring this, not Google. Google has a role, of course, but it's that it isn't able to stand up to the Chinese Government. (Breaking it up, whatever that means, surely wouldn't improve its leverage over the Chinese government.
Just pointing out, your angst on this score is misdirected. Change in China will not and cannot come from foreign companies operating there.
It can and it must. These companies can and should lobby their governments to place tariffs and restrictions on Chinese companies and their products/services, unless the Chinese become a more open society. An uncensored Google in China would encourage democratic reforms. Democratic reforms would bring Chinese labor rights closer to a Western standard, eroding a principal reason Western firms outsource to China. This rising tide would lift all boats except for the Communist Party's.
History is filled with examples of countries which became more free and then grew through openness and trade. These countries became new markets for companies like Google and many others. What we lack today is leaders with the vision and courage to follow this path, both in politics and business.