To satisfy their appetite for drama, some watch Lost. Others allow their roommate to prattle endlessly about a significant other who won’t return their calls. This semester, I’ve gotten my fill by following the Google-China conflict in the news.

I’ve been proud of Google’s actions, troubled by China’s, and surprised by neither’s. It’s an issue that is more complex than many would assume—polarizing attitudes color our perceptions of Google and China, but the most misunderstood group of all may be Chinese Internet users at large.

In January, Google announced that hacking attacks coming from China had tried to breach the Gmail accounts of domestic human rights activists and dissidents. Google co-founder Sergey Brin called it the “straw which broke the camel’s back,” following growing distaste with China’s political censorship and totalitarian encroachments on free expression online.

Google then threatened to pull out of China, unless it was allowed to cease censorship blocks on its search functions. The Chinese did not back down, and Google elected to re-route its search operations through Hong Kong instead (“one country, two systems”). With google.cn terminated, users are now offered google.com.hk instead.

Having worked for Google for two (soon to be three) summers, the first of which was actually spent with the policy/government affairs team in Washington, D.C., and having spent last semester studying in China, I claim to be reasonably qualified to evaluate some of these recent events. (For the record, my opinions here are fully my own.)

A fuzzy picture has developed of the Googlers in China—richer, more urban, better-informed than others in the country—a stereotype that is reasonably accurate. So how much will Google truly be missed?

Some Chinese netizens have written open letters questioning and bemoaning the loss of Google, and it is only this vocal distress that has provided us a window into the situation. But China has more Internet users than there are people in the United States, and more than two-thirds of those do not rely on Google. In the eyes of many—including the former head of Google China, Lee Kai Fu—Internet usage is unlikely to shrink.

Chinese users can go to Youku instead of YouTube, and Baidu (a prominent Chinese search engine) works well for surfing, even if it isn’t quite as good as Google. In fact, I discovered at Peking University that the most important feature of Google for students was actually the Google Scholar function. Baidu lacks a comparable offering, and the withdrawal is a significant setback for many academic users. (Imagine trying to write a paper these days without it!)

Still, this comes back to my first point: In worrying about Google’s departure from China, we have created a false understanding of Chinese Internet use. What’s forgotten, when considering how people use Google, is who will reasonably be reliant on the re-routed system. Students’ main obstacle is not the Great Firewall (the main censorship of the Chinese government) but instead the Great Economic Disincentive.

Paying for access to foreign websites costs nearly 10 times as much as monthly access to .cn sites alone, a difference equivalent to several weeks’ worth of meals. With that kind of economic burden, many simply don’t sign up for foreign sites—period. They often anticipate needing to pay for the access later, for specific research which will require access to JSTOR or similar databases, but students were largely able to make do without these resources with limited frustrations.

CNN, New York Times, Wikipedia—it didn’t matter that these sources were technically unblocked by Google at the time, because the majority of users couldn’t access them anyway! If you had to pay significantly more to reach a number of sites on the Internet, how likely are you to visit them?

I believe in the liberating power of technology—rightly applied—and more broadly, that the Chinese Communist Party is on the wrong side of history. Google has managed to exit China while reaping an enormous political windfall. But why would anyone have expected things to go differently?

From the moment Google announced the hacking attempts and its commitment to cease censorship, it was clear that it would be exiting China; it was merely a question of timing. Google had publicly scorned and embarrassed the Chinese government, and there was no alternative. Nor is it a surprise that the CCP failed to capitulate, given the implications for its standing, regardless of the blow caused by Google’s high-profile exit.

These changes should not be seen as simple business motivations but rather within the context of Google’s corporate ethos and leadership—as should the Chinese government’s reaction. Many groups—e.g., the Congressional-Executive Commission on China—are using the Google situation as a proxy by which to criticize China, clouding analysis of this situation and making it harder to capture the nuances of the situation and the diplomatic dilemmas it introduces.

Google’s exit is bad for the image of the CCP, bad for innovation and competition in the Chinese web, and unfortunate for those Chinese users who really relied on it. But rather than skeptically attacking Google’s motives, we should press China for more openness in their policies.

Foreign companies should obey local laws, but not at the cost of legitimate political speech. Though China’s international humiliation is a very real consequence of Google’s actions, we err in overestimating the ultimate domestic changes it will effect. Most average users won’t have their lives changed, and the real effects will be the goodwill that Google gains in Washington and Brussels, where ever-increasing scrutiny of Google’s market dominance is building.