Google retreats in China

Google Inc said Tuesday it will stop automatically routing users in China to its Hong Kong site after Beijing threatened the company with the loss of its Internet licence in their latest skirmish over censorhip.

Google shut down its China-based search engine March 22 to avoid cooperating with the communist government's Internet censorship and has re-routed users to Hong Kong.

But Google said regulators told the company its Internet licence, which allows it to operate a music download service and other features in China, would not be renewed after it expires Wednesday if that tactic continues.

"They made it clear to us that they did not think the redirect was acceptable," said a Google spokeswoman, Jessica Powell.

She declined to say what reasons the government gave for its objections.

The loss of permission to operate a China-based website would damage Google's access to an Internet market that already is the world's biggest and still growing fast, with 384 million people online at the end of 2009.

Under the new measure, instead of being automatically switched to Hong Kong, visitors to Google.cn see a tab that says, "We have moved to google.com.hk."

Clicking on that takes users to the Chinese-language site in Hong Kong, which is Chinese territory but has Western-style civil liberties with no Internet filtering.

Automatic re-routing would end completely in the next few days, Google's chief legal officer David Drummond said on a company blog, leaving open the possibility that some users still were being switched to Hong Kong on Tuesday.

no immediate word

There was no immediate word from Beijing about whether the move was sufficient for Google to keep its Internet licence.

"This new approach is consistent with our commitment not to self-censor and, we believe, with local law," said Drummond.

"We are, therefore, hopeful that our licence will be renewed on this basis so we can continue to offer our Chinese users services via Google.cn."

But Chinese regulators might not be satisfied, said Edward Yu, president of Analysys International, an Internet research firm in Beijing.

"It's not clear today whether just doing it that way is also permitted," Yu said.

Google's popularity in China was unhurt by the automatic re-routing and advertising revenues stayed strong, Yu said. But he said the added click to reach Hong Kong, if Chinese regulators allow Google to operate that way, might drive away some users.

Google 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.

It has a 30 per cent share of China's search traffic, versus 60 per cent for local rival Baidu Inc.

AP