14 DAY TRIAL // Google has just announced that it has been given a license to operate a website in China, after more than a week of delays. The company’s existing license had expired on June 30 and without one it would be impossible for it to run Google.cn. The company hasn’t provided any details beyond the fact that it has been granted the license.
"We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP (internet content provider) licence and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China," Google's lawyer David Drummond said in an update on the original blog post describing the China situation. Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, was confident that his company will get the approval.
With the license approved, Google can continue to offer services in China through Google.cn. The situation in China deteriorated for Google earlier this year when it said it will stop providing censored search results in the country. This followed a series of attacks on its infrastructure that the company said were traced back to China, although Google stopped short of incriminating the government directly.
In early April, Google move its entire search engine to Hong Kong and started redirecting Chinese visitors to Google.com.hk. This meant that it could provide uncensored search results, although searches and pages are still filtered by the Great Firewall of China.
A couple of weeks ago Google revealed that its ICP was about to expire and that it had stopped automatically redirecting users to its Hong Kong servers. Instead, Google.cn served as a landing page featuring a giant link to Google.com.hk but also several services that Google offered locally, like Translate and Music.
The move was apparently enough to appease the Chinese authorities which have now granted Google permission to operate the site. The negotiations between the parties may have went deeper than what has surfaced, but the end result is now clear, Google is going to stay in China, in this format, at least in the short to mid term.