Google stops rerouting China's searches to Hong Kong site

On June 29, Google said it will stop automatically rerouting users of its China search site to its Hong Kong site after Beijing threatened the company with the loss of its Internet license.

Google said regulators told the company its Internet license, which expires Wednesday, would not be renewed if that 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. Instead of automatically being switched to Hong Kong, visitors to Google.cn now see a tab that says in Chinese "We have moved to google.com.hk." Users can click on that tab to move to the Chinese-language site in Hong Kong, which is a Chinese territory but has Western-style civil liberties with no Internet filtering. There was no immediate word from Beijing about whether the measure was sufficient for Google to keep its Chinese Internet license.