he Chinese government doesn’t like Google. This is why China’s internet is barred from everything which is Google. China is probably the only place on earth where Google is struggling to do well. Recently however, there was good news for Google that despite their grievances, the Chinese internetregulatory authority has renewed Google’s license (as an Internet Content Provider (ICP)) which will allow the search giant to continue its operation in China as a search engine.
Because of the censorship problems faced by Google on its China based domain (Google.cn), Google was redirecting traffic from its .cn domain to its Hong Kong based uncensored domain (google.com.hk) which allegedly wasn’t appreciated by the Chinese government and threatened Google its ICP license at the time of renewal if Google didn’t stop the practice. Google adopted a new way of coming out of the situation and placed a link on its China search page which would allow users to manually redirect their search queries to Google Hong Kong. This link, as reported by the Google Blog worked its magic and had Google its ICP license renewed.
“We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP license and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China,” wrote Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond.