Google re-boots China adventure
p2pnet view Politics| Advertising:- China is the world’s largest expanding market.
For the moment, its Communist leaders have it under tight control. But that won’t last forever. So did anyone really believe the world’s largest online advertising company would abandon it, expressions of righteous indignation notwithstanding?
“Today is the day giant online advertising company Google theoretically packs its bags and leaves China, claiming bitterly it’s been unjustly and unfairly treated”, said p2pnet in March, going on:
“Wicked Chinese hackers penetrated its security fences, it said, enlisting the taxpayer funded NSA, the federal US spy agency, to drive home the full horror of the situation.
“It even tried to get the US government to ‘escalate its personal and, relatively speaking, trifling problems with China bumped up to US trade status’, said p2pnet recently.
“But skeptics wonder if the cries of Foul! were in fact generated because Gargle was getting its metaphorical ass kicked.”
Solution? Re-direct traffic to Hong Kong.
But now all is apparently forgiven, if not forgotten.
“We currently automatically redirect everyone using Google.cn to Google.com.hk, our Hong Kong search engine”, posts the company’s David Drummond on the official Gargle blog. But “it’s clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable”, he says.
What a surprise. 
Then comes the core of the matter.
If “we continue redirecting users our Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed (it’s up for renewal on June 30)”, says Drummond. “Without an ICP license, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn — so Google would effectively go dark in China.”
Go dark in China! Oh! The Horror!
The awful prospect is “dreaded” by many Chinese users, says Drummond continuing >>>
We have therefore 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. This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page.
Over the next few days we’ll end the redirect entirely, taking all our Chinese users to our new landing page — and today we re-submitted our ICP license renewal application based on this approach.
“This new approach is consistent with our commitment not to self censor and, we believe, with local law”, he says, adding, “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.”
Stay tuned? 
(Cheers, RW)
… and identi.ca
p2pnet – Google: ‘Farewell, China, we hardly knew ye’, March 22, 2010
Gargle blog – An update on China, June 28, 2010
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June 29th, 2010 at 3:22 pm
China should reject them. I wouldn’t let google back after crawling on their knee’s groveling to please let people use our products. It’s not like yahoo or bing can’t fill the google void.
Bet the US is going to interfere on behalf of their spy agency.
meh