China Renews Google's Content Provider License 64
snydeq writes "The Chinese government has renewed Google's Internet Content Provider license (announcement), enabling the company to continue to provide Web search and other local products to users in China. If Google had been unable to renew its license, it could have meant the end of the company's operations in China, leaving search engine rival Baidu to dominate the market. Last week Google began making efforts to win over Chinese officials. Rather than automatically redirecting Google.cn visitors to Google's Hong Kong search engine (a strategy the Chinese government found unacceptable), the company now sends visitors to a 'landing page' where they can choose to click on a link leading to the Hong Kong site, or stay to use unfiltered services such as music or text translation."
Re:And this is important... (Score:3, Insightful)
Despite tensions, the worlds largest search engine is NOT getting kicked out of the worlds largest internet using country. The implications of which involve tech, politics, freedom of speech...
If that's not Nerd News I don't know what is.
If you're hungry for interesting stuff that doesn't make the front page take a drink from the Firehose.
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl [slashdot.org]
Re:Not much of a change (Score:4, Insightful)
What I'm saying in short is this. If China was serious about maintaining an iron fist, Google would have been kicked out long ago!
Google had initially agreed to filtered search results inside China. It wasn't until they vocally said they were planning to stop filtering that China threatened to kick them out. Google has played ball up to this point and that's why they haven't been kicked out. Your reasoning makes no sense.
In fact, China is trying to tell the world "read between the lines". We want freedom, but we're sure as hell not going to make it obvious.
Judging by the near constant stream of news from Reporters without Borders [rsf.org] I'd have to disagree with you.
Re:Not much of a change (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll have to disagree with you there. The Communist Party of China absolutely wants to retain political control over China.
The problem they face, which causes things like the Google situation, is that they in order to avoid large scale revolt, they need to maintain a high economic growth rate. And totalitarian economies aren't particularly good at getting economies to grow. So the Party is trying to have a sort-of free market economy while still denying the Chinese people political choice.
But having economic freedom but not political freedom naturally creates friction and strange situations. Like the Google one.