China Renews Google’s License | Hacker News Reader

China Renews Google’s License

nytimes.com

35 pointsyanw19 comments

No registration: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/10566318.stm

I haven't checked whether the content is the same, however.

Googles move in China will leave lots of revenue on the table for Baidu. Moving search to HK was a reasonable thing to do but they might have also left a varient search engine back at .cn that would only see products and services, in safe categories. That might have allowed them to dodge the censorship issues and keep advertisers happy until China begins to relax its censorship rules in the coming years.

Lots of good news coming out of China lately: appreciation of the yuan, increase of worker wages & now a slow opening up in the Google case.

For China, I feel like this is a slippery slope that will (despite the governments best efforts for many years) put the country on level ground with the rest of the world.

Thus, China's enormous influence over the rest of the world will decrease, their mad profitability will decrease, and the level of respect they receive will increase.

So their respect will be gained when they are worse off?

It will be gained when they're working under the same restrictions as those who they trade with.

China is continuing to permit Google to show a link to Google Hong Kong, after likely withholding Google's ICP license renewal if they continued to automatically redirect to Goog HK. I don't see much opening up here.

Clicking anywhere on the page effectively goes to google.com.hk so google.cn is pretty much just a dummy page. I guess it is all semantics, but it's a pretty dumb game.

Clicking anywhere on the page effectively goes to google.com.hk so google.cn is pretty much just a dummy page.

You're right. I thought that:

"Under the current setup in mainland China, users can conduct a Google search and see the results, but often they cannot open the links."

...meant that users could conduct the search via google.cn without being redirected to google.com.hk.

Now, Google can put a strip along the top of that dummy page with an option whether or not to automatically redirect for repeat visitors from the same computer or IP address. Then only first-time visitors need click on the page! Would that continue to satisfy China's demand I wonder?

The yuan will likely appreciate significantly over the next two decades (money could be made on that), unfortunately always at the rate dictated by the government.

They want to avoid the repeat of the sudden Yen appreciation and Japan's Lost Decade.

It's quite disappointing to see them go from: "we're pulling out" to: "please renew our domain license Mr. Nice Government."

I suppose their original threat was a touch naive.

Their play wasn't "we're pulling out." It was "we're not censoring anymore." As far as I know, they're still not censoring anymore. Seems to me like a win for all involved.

That's true, but it seemed like pulling out was the logical conclusion after "breaking local laws".

The thing I don't understand is why going from "autoredirect" to "click to redirect" was the crux for renewal. It feels strange that that was the key deciding factor for the Government.

It was not. It was a face-saving act for the CPC courtesy of Google, and both parties knew it. Now Google officially complies to Chinese government demands, and they can chalk it as victory (no matter if only very formal one).

Exactly, Google complies with the government demands. But next year there will be more government demands.

I'm not sure about that. Google already demonstrated they don't care about their presence in China that much to put up with the crap, so the Party will likely avoid stand-offs in the future.

This one I can explain, it's a token concession used by the government to get Google in the "right frame of mind" (in their view). Google gives them an inch, eventually they will demand a mile.

Google's domain renewal, from now until the foreseeable future, will be a difficult time for Google/China relations - the government will escalate their demands every year. It will be interesting to see what the government makes them do next year to keep the domain.

It's part of their negotiating process, that government is very used to being threatened like this and certainly knows how to return in kind. Politics in China can be incredibly subtle (and deadly).

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