14 DAY TRIAL // Google’s plan to serve the Chinese search market without censoring results may have hit a snag. For the past few months, the company has been redirecting traffic from Google.cn to its Hong Kong servers where it could provide unfiltered searches, to the dislike of the Chinese government. China filtered the Hong Kong site, just like any other foreign website, but didn’t do much else, perhaps because it had the upper hand.
Google’s Chinese Internet Content Provider (ICP) license will expire tomorrow and the government isn’t about to renew it. Without it, Google can't run Google.cn, so for millions of people the site would go down. The answer was to stop redirecting visitors to the Hong Kong servers, which is what Google is doing now.
“We have.. been looking at possible alternatives, and instead of automatically redirecting all our users, we have started taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering,” David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer at Google, explained.
The plan now is to stop redirecting entirely. Over the next few days all Chinese visitors will be taken to the new Google landing page. The idea is to give them a choice of doing a search on Google.com.hk, the Hong-Kong-based, unfiltered version of the site, or having them use services which Google can provide in China unfiltered.
For now, the landing page amounts to a giant link to Google.com.hk. It resembles a regular Google Search site, but all that you can do on it is to go to the Hong Kong site. This may not be the final design.
However, with the new landing page in place, Google has re-submitted its application for an ICP license. The company hopes that this approach, of not automatically redirecting visitors, does comply with the local laws and should be enough for it to be issued the license. But there are no guarantees that this will happen.
“This new approach is consistent with our commitment not to self censor and, we believe, with local law. 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,” Drummond concluded.
