this google/china thing is interesting. china has rather the larger armed forces. but you would have to think google has a lot of leverage. it might be hard to run a country without google: more and more, i imagine it is. and not that anyone is going to throw this on the table, but what data on the chinese state and its officials etc is stored on some google server somewhere? if google succeeded in resisting the repressive measures, this would indicate that we are entering a world in which, precisely due to information technologies,  totalitarianism is becoming impossible. however, of course then you'd have to think about google itself as a potentially repressive world regime.