Google Inc. may lose its license to operate its website in China, forcing it to abandon the world’s largest Internet market, after the government objected to the company’s efforts to avoid censorship controls.
The Chinese government has made it clear it won’t renew Google’s Internet license should the company continue to automatically redirect users of the Chinese service to its unfiltered site in Hong Kong, Google said in a blog post today. Google will change the way users access its site and resubmitted an application to operate in the country, it said.
“Google would effectively go dark in China,” Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said in the posting. “It’s clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable.”
The dispute with the government has cost the company partnerships with China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd. and Motorola Inc. in the country. The operator of the world’s biggest Internet search-engine said in January it would stop self-censorship of its Google.cn portal, defying the laws of a state that controls its media and bans references to the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.
Google said it plans to stop redirecting users automatically in the next “few days” and has submitted a renewal license application based on the proposal that the Chinese website will instead leave a link to the Hong Kong site, according to the blog posting.
The deadline to submit the application is tomorrow, said Jessica Powell, a spokesman for Google.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...sers-to-hong-kong-site-on-license-threat.html
This leads me to wonder why they tried to leave in the first place... May a nice PR for its Andoid OS be a plausible motive?
The Chinese government has made it clear it won’t renew Google’s Internet license should the company continue to automatically redirect users of the Chinese service to its unfiltered site in Hong Kong, Google said in a blog post today. Google will change the way users access its site and resubmitted an application to operate in the country, it said.
“Google would effectively go dark in China,” Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said in the posting. “It’s clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable.”
The dispute with the government has cost the company partnerships with China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd. and Motorola Inc. in the country. The operator of the world’s biggest Internet search-engine said in January it would stop self-censorship of its Google.cn portal, defying the laws of a state that controls its media and bans references to the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.
Google said it plans to stop redirecting users automatically in the next “few days” and has submitted a renewal license application based on the proposal that the Chinese website will instead leave a link to the Hong Kong site, according to the blog posting.
The deadline to submit the application is tomorrow, said Jessica Powell, a spokesman for Google.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...sers-to-hong-kong-site-on-license-threat.html
This leads me to wonder why they tried to leave in the first place... May a nice PR for its Andoid OS be a plausible motive?
