You can tell this is from 2007 because Google employees are obsessing about what Yahoo! are doing. Today, it would be Facebook.
Yes, Google+ is the intermediate step in the all seeing "identity" service depicted in this story ;)
(Which is to say: Doctorow seems to have seen being in China as a big step on the way to relaxing "Don't be evil". But perhaps Google was only in China because it had already relaxed on "Don't be evil". And thus staying in China, or even going there initially, was relatively irrelevant to its corporate trajectory.)
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mike@Fuzzbutt:~$ curl -s http://www.scroogle.org/doctorow.html|cat -n|grep -i yahoo
231 Greg felt sick. "Why? Don't tell me Yahoo was doing it already..."
234 "No, no. Well, yes. Sure. Yahoo was doing it. But that wasn't the
331 "The government said they'd block us otherwise. And Yahoo was
333 Google had become obsessed with Yahoo, more concerned with what the
mike@Fuzzbutt:~$EDIT: It's supposed to be Command Line Owned, but I can't stop seeing "clown".
Hmm. Still seeing clown. :(