| Google Says China Has Been Renewed Its Internet License |
| Friday, 09 July 2010 12:19 |
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The Chinese government has renewed the Google Internet content Provider (ICP) license, the company announced Friday in an update of an earlier blog posting.If Google had been able to renew its license, it could have meant the closure of its operations in China.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that he expected Beijing to renew license.Google CEO Eric Schmidt told an industry gathering on Thursday in the U.S. that he was confident it would secure a license.
Google, based in Mountain View, California, has the kind of dominance in the Chinese search market, it is not in the U.S. search engine operated by Chinese competitor Baidu has about 60 percent of the market for Google’s 30 percent.
Losing the Chinese license would be a serious setback for Google, though, China will account for only a fraction of the estimated 28 billion U.S. dollars in revenue this year. China has already shown itself to be the Internet’s largest market with almost 400 million web surfers, and its use is expected to increase in coming years.
Renewal of license to provide Internet content has been in doubt because of the rocky relationship between Google and the Chinese authorities over the hacking of Gmail accounts and censorship of Google search results.
Google’s relations with Beijing have been rocky since the American search giant said it no longer wanted to cooperate with the government online censorship. The notice was prompted by the cyber attack is traced to China.
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