Google, China Kiss and Make Up
On Thursday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicted that China would let his company back into the country after a months-long stand-off. A few hours later, voila!
Google (GOOG) made the announcement in understated form, by updating a blog post: “We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP license and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China.”
The move follows Google’s concession last month, when it stopped automatically redirecting Chinese surfers to an uncensored, Hong Kong-based version of its search engine. Now instead of an automatic redirect, Google has added a button linking Google.cn users to the Hong Kong site.