

China Renews Google’s License - yanw
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/technology/10google.html

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vmind
No registration: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/10566318.stm>

I haven't checked whether the content is the same, however.

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felog
Googles move in China will leave lots of revenue on the table for Baidu.
Moving search to HK was a reasonable thing to do but they might have also left
a varient search engine back at .cn that would only see products and services,
in safe categories. That might have allowed them to dodge the censorship
issues and keep advertisers happy until China begins to relax its censorship
rules in the coming years.

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c1sc0
Lots of good news coming out of China lately: appreciation of the yuan,
increase of worker wages & now a slow opening up in the Google case.

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WalterGR
China is _continuing_ to permit Google to show a link to Google Hong Kong,
after likely withholding Google's ICP license renewal if they continued to
automatically redirect to Goog HK. I don't see much opening up here.

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invisible
Clicking anywhere on the page effectively goes to google.com.hk so google.cn
is pretty much just a dummy page. I guess it is all semantics, but it's a
pretty dumb game.

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WalterGR
_Clicking anywhere on the page effectively goes to google.com.hk so google.cn
is pretty much just a dummy page._

You're right. I thought that:

"Under the current setup in mainland China, users can conduct a Google search
and see the results, but often they cannot open the links."

...meant that users could conduct the search via google.cn without being
redirected to google.com.hk.

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strebler
It's quite disappointing to see them go from: "we're pulling out" to: "please
renew our domain license Mr. Nice Government."

I suppose their original threat was a touch naive.

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spiffage
Their play wasn't "we're pulling out." It was "we're not censoring anymore."
As far as I know, they're still not censoring anymore. Seems to me like a win
for all involved.

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strebler
That's true, but it seemed like pulling out was the logical conclusion after
"breaking local laws".

The thing I don't understand is why going from "autoredirect" to "click to
redirect" was the crux for renewal. It feels strange that that was the key
deciding factor for the Government.

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varjag
It was not. It was a face-saving act for the CPC courtesy of Google, and both
parties knew it. Now Google officially complies to Chinese government demands,
and they can chalk it as victory (no matter if only very formal one).

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zapb
Exactly, Google complies with the government demands. But next year there will
be more government demands.

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varjag
I'm not sure about that. Google already demonstrated they don't care about
their presence in China _that_ much to put up with the crap, so the Party will
likely avoid stand-offs in the future.

