If China were a market economy, Google's management team would probably be in high spirits right now. For Baidu, China's leading internet search engine, is facing unprecedented challenges - media reports accusing it of hurting consumers' interests and growing numbers of advertising customers threatening to drag it into court.

But if China were a market economy, Google would not be trailing Baidu by 40 percentage points in market share in the first place. A mature, educated internet populace should have found years ago that Baidu's practice of mixing sponsored links with "organic" search results does not serve it well, and rejected it.