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Google Cowed by Yet Another Beijing Threat
Joe McDonald | June 29, 2010

A pedestrian walks past Google Inc. A pedestrian walks past Google Inc.'s China headquarters in Beijing, China, on Tuesday. Google Inc. said it will change the way people in China access its search engine after the government said the company could no longer automatically redirect users to the unfiltered Hong Kong Site. Google created a "landing site" that offers Chinese users the option of going to the Hong Kong site. (Bloomberg Photo/Nelson Ching)
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Beijing. Google said on Tuesday it would stop automatically routing users in China to its Hong Kong site after Beijing threatened the company with the loss of its Internet license in their latest skirmish over censorship.

Google shut down its China-based search engine on March 22 to avoid cooperating with the communist government’s Internet censorship and has rerouted users to Hong Kong.

But Google said regulators told the company its Internet license, which allows it to operate various features in China, would not be renewed after it expires on Wednesday if that tactic continued.

“They made it clear to us that they did not think the redirect was acceptable,” said a Google spokeswoman, Jessica Powell. She declined to say what reasons the government gave for its objections.

The loss of permission to operate a China-based Web site would damage Google’s access to an Internet market that already is the world’s biggest and still growing fast, with 384 million people online at the end of 2009.

Under the new measure, instead of being automatically switched to Hong Kong, visitors to Google.cn see a tab that says, “We have moved to google.com.hk.”

Clicking on that takes users to the Chinese-language site in Hong Kong, which is Chinese territory but has Western-style civil liberties with no Internet filtering.

Automatic rerouting would end completely in the next few days, Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond said on a company blog, leaving open the possibility that some users still were being switched to Hong Kong on Tuesday.

There was no immediate word from Beijing about whether the move was sufficient for Google to keep its Internet license.

“This new approach is consistent with our commitment not to self-censor and, we believe, with local law,” said Drummond. “We are therefore hopeful that our license will be renewed on this basis so we can continue to offer our Chinese users services via Google.cn.”

But Chinese regulators might not be satisfied, said Edward Yu, president of Analysys International, an Internet research company in Beijing.

“It’s not clear today whether just doing it that way is also permitted,” Yu said.

Google’s popularity in China was unhurt by the automatic rerouting and advertising revenues stayed strong, Yu said.

But he said the added click to reach Hong Kong, if Chinese regulators allow Google to operate that way, might drive away some users.

“If traffic is hurt, then advertisers will panic and cut spending,” he said.

A foreign ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, said he had not seen Google’s announcement and could not comment on it.

Google has vowed to keep a tight grip on online content and to block subversive material.

Regulators block Web sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to prevent dissidents and human rights or Tibet activists from using them to spread criticism of Beijing.


Associated Press