“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.”

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, Mr. 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.”

Mr. Pichai underlined this argument — that providing some access to the outside world is better than none — by citing his experience growing up in India.

“My dad worked for a U.K. company, and they went through whether they should be in India or should they pull out,” he told Google’s staff, according to a transcript obtained by The New York Times. “And they stayed, and that made a difference for my dad. And in all likelihood, I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for that.”

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.

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, Mr. 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.