Beijing, China — Just last year, search engine giant Google diverted its searches offshore helped the company avoid China’s censorship rules, which bans pornography, gambling and content that criticizes the countries ruling Communist Party. But, on Wednesday Chinese regulators have renewed a key license for Google Inc., suggesting that authorities continue to accept the way the U.S. Internet giant has restructured its local operations to stop censoring its own Chinese-language search results, according to reports from Bloomberg.
According to various media sources quoting the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology appointed Google’s China website operator, Beijing Guxiang Information Technology Co. Ltd., as one of 137 firms whose licenses were revived following adjustments in their operations.
According to a statement, Wang Lijian, director of the news office of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, a main Internet regulator, mentioned that the government has renewed the “Internet Content Provider License” that Google uses in China for another year, a license required of all locally operated websites.
“We can confirm that the government has renewed our [Internet Content Provider] license,” Google said in a statement to various media outlets. The commercial license simply allows Google to operate its local Web portal, Google.cn, and continue syndicating search results to other local search engines.
Google spokeswoman for China Marsha Wang confirmed to AFP that the company had been granted the license renewal.
“We have passed the 2011 annual evaluation (of the license),” she said.
Google may be the leading search engine in the world, but it is the underdog in China after butting heads with the government on countless occasions over the past two years.
The ministry has issued the adjustments after some companies had modified their shareholding structures without official permission, provided services beyond their approved business range or had lax information security controls.
Chinese authorities regulates Internet content in part through issuing licenses and overseeing companies like Google and its chief Chinese competitor Baidu Inc. Authorities also block or limit access to websites based overseas.
Google scaled back its China operations last year after a public spat with authorities over its concerns about censorship and hacking, announcing that it would stop filtering its content as required by local regulations. The move caused users to fear the company would discontinue its Chinese-language services entirely, or that the government would retaliate by banning its websites within the country.
Google said in March last year it would no longer bow to government censors and effectively shut down its Chinese search engine, and redirected users from its Chinese domain address, Google.cn, to a website in Hong Kong whose search results Google does not filter.
While the dispute remained in place for over a year, the company’s market share has dropped in China over the past 20 months, falling due to increased competition from Chinese company Baidu, which also moved to utilize Google’s Android platform to release its own mobile operating system, but also because it refused to comply with China’s requirements for websites to self-censor content.
Moreover, the Chinese government continues to censor the search results of Google’s overseas sites for users inside the country, and access to the overseas sites and to its Gmail service have become increasingly unstable for users in China, causing Google’s share of traffic and revenue in the country to fall. The authorities have also placed blocks on Google’s YouTube service and has restricted access to Facebook and Twitter, both of which have popular Chinese rival services.
According to China-based Analysys International, Google China’s market share in the second quarter slid 0.3 percent to 18.9 percent of the online search market. Baidu, a local search provider, has inched its way up over the years to 75.9 percent.
At its three-year peak, Google China held 35.6 percent of the market versus Baidu’s 58.4 percent, back in 2009.
Nevertheless, Google, otherwise the largest search engine in the world, is striving to compete with China’s homegrown Baidu, which has now partnered with Google rival Microsoft to get its English languages searches powered by Bing.