Google is to stop automatically redirecting users of its Google.cn site to its Hong Kong page, in a bid to secure renewal of the company’s China service license. The move comes after the Chinese government said the company would lose its mainland Internet license, which expires Wednesday, if the tactic continued. Chief legal officer David […]
Google is to stop automatically redirecting users of its Google.cn site to its Hong Kong page, in a bid to secure renewal of the company’s China service license. The move comes after the Chinese government said the company would lose its mainland Internet license, which expires Wednesday, if the tactic continued.
Chief legal officer David Drummond said in a blog posting that Google had already started taking a small percentage of users to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk, and would soon stop all redirecting.
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“The new page will be connected with Google.com.hk,” said Marsha Wang, Google’s China-based spokeswoman. “The message we received from relevant authorities is that redirection is not acceptable.”
Google shut down its China-based search engine March 22 to avoid cooperating with the communist government’s Internet filtering and has rerouted users to its unfiltered site in Hong Kong. But Google said regulators told the company its Internet license, would not be renewed if that continues.
Google still operates a music download service and several other features on Google.cn that are not affected by filtering regulations and Powell said it wants those services to continue.
Instead of automatically being switched to Google.hk, visitors to Google.cn now see a tab that says in Chinese “We have moved to google.com.hk.” Users can click on that tab to move to the site in Hong Kong, which is a Chinese territory but has Western-style civil liberties and no Internet filtering.
A foreign ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, said he had not seen Google’s announcement and could not comment on it. However, he added, “I would like to stress that the
Chinese government encourages foreign enterprises to operate in China according to law.”
Google also hopes to keep a research center in China, an advertising sales team that generates most of its revenue in the country and a fledgling mobile phone business
