A Google spokeswoman told me that the controversial effort — code-named Dragonfly — is “exploratory,” and that Google is “not close to launching a search product in China.” What’s most interesting is that much of the outrage about the possibility seems to be coming from Google employees who have registered strong objections, rather than from outside.

For those who don’t know the history, Google began operating in China in 2000 and in 2005 the Microsoft tech leader Kai-Fu Lee was hired as the head of Google China. By 2009 Google controlled more than 36 percent of the market share and served hundreds of millions of mainland Chinese users.

It offered a truncated version of a search product, which included this disclaimer at the bottom of the page: “Some results have been withheld because of the government restrictions.” Google’s justification for being there was that bringing more information to the information-starved Chinese was a good thing.

“At least Chinese users knew what they were missing,” Nicole Wong, a former top Google lawyer, recently explained to me on my podcast.

The hope was that more information could help loosen the government’s stranglehold. That did not happen.

By 2010, Google was fed up with increasing repression and intrusions into its systems by Chinese-government-backed hackers. After a prolonged debate, Google withdrew to Hong Kong with a noncensored offering and was effectively out of the larger Chinese market. “Our objection is to those forces of totalitarianism,” Mr. Brin said at the time. He also wrote on his Google Plus page that the “primary threat by far to internet freedom is government filtering of political dissent.” This rejection of censorship was a bold stance, setting Google apart from other companies, like Apple, that had compromised with the Chinese government in order to do business there.

Fast forward to today, when Google is being falsely accused of censoring speech in the United States, when what it is really doing is mulling a return to censorship in China.