The Chinese authorities have expressed their negative opinion on Google’s practice of redirecting Chinese searchers their uncensored search site from Hong Kong. In order to prevent any further downfall of business the search engine has decided to terminate this redirection. Google started this activity in the month of March after a decision it made that stopped censoring of search results in the country of China.
This resulted into an almost immediate protest from the Chinese authorities. An unnamed official of the Chinese State Council Information Office said that by stopping search filters and by blaming the country as a source for alleged attacks by hackers, Google has breached the written contract it made prior to entering the Chinese market. His report further included that the action was wrong by all means and that the government of Chins was completely in opposition to making commercial issues political. The report expressed the government’s indignation and discontent towards the search engine for its accusation and conducts and termed them ‘unreasonable’. This was followed by disruptions of the Web services by Google. It prompted the search engine to introduce a dashboard displaying the status in which its offerings were. As on Tuesday only Gmail, Web search, News, Images and Ads were fully functional on Google in China out of a total of twelve services. The completely or partially blocked services include Blogger, Mobile, You tube, Groups, Sites, Picasa and Docs.
Google is planning to stop redirecting the users in China to Google.com.hk
According to his blog on Tuesday, David Drummond Google SVP and chief legal officer said that Google is planning to stop redirecting the users in China to Google.com.hk and they will be routed to a new page on Google.cn that is linked to Google.com.hk, this step has been taken under the continuing threats from the government of China. According to him the conversations that have taken place between the Google officials and those of the Chinese government have made it crystal clear that the later consider the redirection highly unacceptable, also it is obvious that a continuation of the same practice will lead to a cancellation of the renewal application of Google’s Internet content Provider license in china, the absence of this license means that Google will not be able to operate as a commercial web site hence failing in the Chinese market.
So they are left with little options apart from the chosen one, according to Drummond, it is an approach that will allow the search engine to fulfil its commitment of not censoring their results on Google.cn while still giving users an access to all of Google’s services from the same page.
According to recent reports Google is even seeking for a license that will enable it to make its mapping services operational in China. This is due to the new rules issued by the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping in China.
This is going to affect Google a lot and China was also one of the major source for web traffic generation.
