Google’s first online outburst against its Chinese hosts was a stern and high-minded rebuke of state censorship. Over 765 words, chief legal officer David Drummond railed against online attacks and their “security and human rights implications”. The second, two months later in March, was shorter (510 words) and more conciliatory. The third, posted last night, was shorter still (368) and outright deferential. At this rate, Google will be posting news of its exit with a few “lol”s and a smiley on Twitter.

Investors are entitled to ask if the world’s biggest internet company, dealing with the world’s biggest internet market, could have played this any better. As it did in March, Google says it is “hopeful” that its latest move – depositing Google.cn users on a China “landing page”, one click away from the unfiltered Hong Kong-hosted site – will allow it to keep offering web-based services on the mainland. But like the approach it offered back then, redirecting users to Hong Kong, this is not so much a sustainable business plan as an invitation to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology not to renew its licence.

If this increasingly halfhearted show of defiance was supposed to burnish the brand, it hasn’t. Since its first broadside, Google’s shares have underperformed the S&P tech sector by 14 per cent. If it wanted to trigger wider condemnation, it failed. If the aim was to draw attention to China’s muddled relationship with the internet, it was nothing like as effective as the State Council’s white paper this month, which celebrated “citizens’ freedom of speech” in one section while supporting the “exertion of technical means” to suppress it in the next. There is only one clear beneficiary from this bizarre campaign: Baidu, China’s search number one, up 77 per cent this year.