China to Google: Stop Sending Users to Hong Kong

Google will stop automatically rerouting users of its China search site to its Hong Kong site, the company said today, after Beijing threatened the company with the loss of its Internet license. Instead of automatically being switched to Hong Kong, visitors to Google.cn now see a tab that says in Chinese "We have moved to google.com.hk." "They made it clear to us that they did not think the redirect was acceptable," said a Google spokeswoman. She declined to say what reasons the government gave for its objections.

Google shut down its China-based search engine March 22 to avoid cooperating with the communist government's Internet censorship and has rerouted users to its unfiltered site in Hong Kong. But Google said regulators told the company its Internet license, which expires tomorrow, would not be renewed if that continues. Google still operates a music download service and several other features on Google.cn that are not affected by filtering regulations and the company wants those services to continue.
(More Google stories.)