Google's China license renewed

US search giant Google got its license to operate in China renewed. This decision comes after a long series of tensions between China's government and Google but things now seem to have cooled down.

Google's saga in China continues

As you know, latest January, the US company announced its willingness to stop filtering its search results in China. In March, Google decided to redirect all queries from its Chinese site to its Hong Kong site.

Google's ICP license expired June 30th, and the US company had to renew it in order to continue operating in China. However, the automatic redirection to the Hong Kong site was seen as 'unacceptable' by the Chinese government. The search giant decided to stop automatically redirecting its Chinese users and created a dedicated page on google.cn in order to have more chances to get its license renewed.

The move was apparently well accepted by the Chinese government which gave Google the permission to continue its activities in China.

Google China: what's next?

Google accounts for about 31% of the Chinese search market. However, Google has been loosing market share against its main competitor Baidu which took full advantage of Google's moves.

The question is now to see what Google's next moves will be. Its current Chinese page offers few services: search (on Hong Kong site), music, translation and shopping. But Google promised to add other services to the page very soon.