After months of negotiations with the Chinese government, Google has decided that it will not withdraw its search operations from China. Instead the company has redirected its Google.cn site to Google.com.hk, hosted on the company’s server in Hong Kong. The decision was made public yesterday by Google’s senior VP and chief legal officer, David Drummond, on the company’s official blog.
Google had been seeking permission from officials in China to lift filtering of search results on its Chinese search engine, or pull its search business from the country completely, all in response to the cyber attacks Google announced on Jan. 12. The attacks, which have since been branded as Operation Aurora, targeted Gmail accounts of human rights activists in addition to more than 20 other US companies.
Google’s Drummond announced the company’s intent to redirect its search service to Hong Kong, citing repeated free speech offenses such as search filtering and restrictions on numerous social networking websites. This move will effectively ease the censorship of search results for the time being.
“We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced”, said Drummond in the Google blog. “It's entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China.”
Drummond acknowledged that the Chinese government could respond by blocking mainland access to Google services at any point, but hoped that officials in Beijing would refrain from such a drastic measure. To counter this possibility, Google has established a Mainland China service availability page to monitor access to the company’s services.
Drummond concluded his comments by confirming that Google would keep its other businesses in China, including the company's R&D and sales teams.