July 10, 2010 by Andy Russell
The past few months have seen an ongoing battle between internet giants Google, and the Chinese authorities. The long-running controversy has seen plans for Google’s licence renewal within the country being questioned. However, this week Google has issued a statement confirming that the search engine firm’s licence has now been renewed by the Chinese government.
It was thought that China may revoke Google’s licence without renewal, following a redirection in China of users to a landing page in Hong Kong, where censorship laws were not applicable. This was done in an effort to enable Chinese internet users to surf the net without risk of the information they were accessing being limited. Last month, Google agreed to stop the automatic redirection of users.
Google’s search capacity within China is not fully functional due to the censorship, but the search engine firm is permitted to provide results for uncensored returns such as music. It appears that the licence renewal marks a reconciliation between the Chinese government and Google. China has prevented users from obtaining access to unfiltered searches, as all returns pass through a firewall which automatically removes unwanted material. Chinese users now get sent to a landing page, which redirects them automatically to the Hong Kong site.
Following the announcement, shares in Google increased by 2.8%, demonstrating the value in the firm retaining a foothold within China. A source at Google said: “We’ve had a lot of messages from China saying don’t let Google go dark -we’ve managed to do that while staying true to our principles. We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP (internet content provider) licence and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China.”
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