14 DAY TRIAL // China is moving to lock down yet another portion of the Internet. If you’re wondering what it could possibly do on top of its extensive censorship and filtering, it’s now looking to tighten its grip on online map service providers. To operate a mapping service in China, you will need to have a license and 18 companies, all local, have already been approved. Not among those is Google, but also other large, foreign companies like Nokia.
The move, China says, is to ensure that these services don’t reveal state secrets and comes with several requirements for the companies applying for approval. Specifically, China wants all the servers used for these services to be housed inside the country and the companies to not have suffered any data leaks in the past three years. How exactly is blocking services that will still be available outside the country protecting state secrets is unclear.
The first 18 companies, of the ones that applied for a license, have been approved. 30 companies had applied in total. All are local ones and, though the list hasn’t been revealed, it looks like some of the big names are missing. Google is definitely not on the list and, apparently, neither is Baidu, the operator of the largest search engine in China and also one of the biggest mapping services.
Google may have a particularly tough time in getting a license. For one, it doesn’t have any servers inside mainland China and the country is now serviced through servers in Hong Kong. The second reason is why Google uses the Hong Kong servers in the first place, it’s not exactly on the best terms with the Chinese authorities these days following a very public spat earlier this year, which led to Google moving the local version of its search engine out of the country.
"China recently implemented a wide-ranging set of rules relating to online mapping. We are examining the regulations to understand their impact on our maps products in China," a Google spokeswoman told Reuters.