Which might well have been the point from the communist dictatorship.
Google obeying their directive, if only formally, is a face-saving act for CPC. The redirect from the landing page can easily be censored, Google can have their Internet license, and the Party can pretend to domestic public that they have won. Everyone is happy.
Any commercial site operating in China needs an Internet Content Provider license? How does that affect the Hacker-News-reading types who would want to hack together a website and start making money from it? How difficult/expensive/slow is it to get an ICP?
Yes, but for little startups / projects like the kind you mentioned, you could likely go through a middleman with good connections who could get you a working ICP, which would probably technically be that of a shell company you did not own but which was 'lending' you the ICP. Once you got bigger, you would have the money to go through more official channels.
Going the super-official route would be a bit painful unless you already owned a company because the minimal financing for a corporation is high here (compared to the US).
More generally, the rule is - don't yammer about sensitive political issues and try to follow the law and you'll probably be OK.
Yes, but if the website is in english, it's more likely to be tolerated... Also a chinese language website has an unofficial grace period of 2 months..
On how to get the ICP, well I can only speak as a foreigner but it's indeed rather difficult, you need to have a chinese WOFE (Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise) setup to be able to ask for the ICP license and this means you have to inject 30 0 000RMB (45,000$ different provinces have different capital requirements, I'm quoting those from shanghai) within 1 year in your business. After that, I'm not sure of the process but I know that you have to agree to censor user generated contents...
Companies that I know here often first test their idea in the taiwanese and hong kong market before going to the chinese market. Other companies I've seen use the ICP license of partner companies but this can be tricky...
The solution is not to operate the site IN China, as long as it's not too popular or doesn't allow people to express their opinions or communicate with each other(think bbs) it'll be ok.
Ever since we launched Google.cn, our search engine for mainland Chinese users, we have done our best to increase access to information while abiding by Chinese law. This has not always been an easy balance to strike, especially since our January announcement that we were no longer willing to censor results on Google.cn.
We currently automatically redirect everyone using Google.cn to Google.com.hk, our Hong Kong search engine. This redirect, which offers unfiltered search in simplified Chinese, has been working well for our users and for Google. However, it’s clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable—and that if we continue redirecting users our Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed (it’s up for renewal on June 30). Without an ICP license, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn—so Google would effectively go dark in China.
That’s a prospect dreaded by many of our Chinese users, who have been vocal about their desire to keep Google.cn alive. We have therefore been looking at possible alternatives, and instead of automatically redirecting all our users, we have started taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering. This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page.
Over the next few days we’ll end the redirect entirely, taking all our Chinese users to our new landing page—and today we re-submitted our ICP license renewal application based on this approach.
As a company we aspire to make information available to users everywhere, including China. It’s why we have worked so hard to keep Google.cn alive, as well as to continue our research and development work in China. This new approach is consistent with our commitment not to self censor and, we believe, with local law. We are therefore hopeful that our license will be renewed on this basis so we can continue to offer our Chinese users services via Google.cn.
How can Google get away with this? The "Landing page" is basically just an image that you can click on that redirects you to google.com.hk. So, in effect, the only change made is that you must _click_ on the page to go to google.com.hk instead of the automatic redirect. Big LOL. I do hope they get away with this. Whoever thought of this audacious (and simplistic) move is a genius.
Perhaps they don't care that much to make large gestures to get their license renewed. Seems like they've made the minimum gesture possible without comprising their earlier stated principles on this.
Many friends of mine have asked for my opinions on this. Figured now will be a good time to vent it out. About myself: http://alexdong.com/. I grow up in China, right now staying in Shanghai, waiting for my australia immigration visa. I have to say that I feel really sad and powerless about this whole event. I think China is gradually cutting itself from outside, like what we've done in 1600.
Instead of writing a long post explaining what I'm having in mind, I found it might be a good idea just to explain why most of the posts so far are unfortunately quite wrong.
> @falsestprophet: The question of who rules China is pretty interesting. It turns out that the whole operation is run by a group of 9 scientists and engineers.
It's easy to think of China as a multi-core Hilter country but it's not. It's true that the 9-people Politburo has the power to set the rules but they're only the top of the iceberg. There are HUGE amount of low level officials, about 5% - 15% population, that actually rule the country using more morale codes rather than laws. Legal process has long been considered scraped.
The last Politburo, with Jiang ZeMin as the president, has actually tried really hard to open up China and setup direct dialogue. But the current one has been cracking down on transparent governing since 2002. The next 'election' will be on 2012, we'll see how that goes. I'm not holding any high expectation here since
1) majority of Chinese population actually agrees with censorship.
2) China has a long history of Xenocide. The boxer rebellion in 1900 was pretty bad and the current communist party is actually silently encouraging that type of nationalism emotions.
> @varjag: Google obeying their directive, if only formally, is a face-saving act for CPC. The redirect from the landing page can easily be censored, Google can have their Internet license, and the Party can pretend to domestic public that they have won. Everyone is happy.
I might be wrong but I don't believe Google will ever get their ICP license issued. I'm not going to argue about this but let's assume that's what happen at end of June, here are the implications I think are highly possible:
* http://google.cn/ and http://g.cn/ will be dead in the dust.
* Chinese will still be able to use http://google.com/
* We'll see lots of `Connection Reset` error whenever the page contains 'sensitive' contents.
* I doubt the chinese version of Google will be still accessible.
For people like me, we'll continue to use our `ssh -C -2 -D` channel or VPN to visit whatever websites we'd like to use.
For most Chinese people, they won't care.
> @jackowayed: How does that affect the Hacker-News-reading types who would want to hack together a website and start making money from it? How difficult/expensive/slow is it to get an ICP?
I used to run China's largest photo blogging site so I have some out-of-date data to share here.
There are actually two kinds of ICP licenses, one is for sites with user generated content and the other without. It takes us 4500 RMB and 3 months to get a license. We have to explicitly write down the IP addresses and the hosting companies. Yes, shared hosting is a risk business since your 'neighbor' might cause the physical machine be unplugged from the internet, which I have witnessed with my own eyes once. Any further censorship requests will go through the hosting companies instead of directly from the government.
For a million page view site, we'll usually get 1-3 phone requests per week to take down contents. What? Did we actually take down as requested? Of course I did! There was an accident that the whole data center was "unplugged" because of some VIP customer was a bit late.
> @garply: I think much of the damage from Google pulling out has already been done - I know people who've switched back to Baidu because they find little things about Google HK frustrating (for example, Google.cn used to mimic Baidu in that you didn't need to control click to open a search result in a new tab - that was the default - Google HK behaves like Google US does).
Ok, I have to say that Google's operation in China was a failure even without the censorship. They tried to copy the market leader by adding music search, discussion forums. Can you imagine Google has a direct link to a forum on their webpage here in China? Google used to be considered, 3-5 years ago, a more accurate search engine with higher quality users. But several mis-calculations on strategies essentially dig deep holes on the ship.
> @jrockway: Seems like they just want something to say to their investors when they have to leave China. If the government fucks them over, it's not Google's fault. If Google just leaves, then their shareholders might be upset.
I think western world is under-estimating the hoops they'll have to jump through in China. Everyone thinks you have to have a presence in China because the market is HUGE. But soon or later, they'll find either they lose control over local sales or have to retreat to focus only on a few major cities. With the changes in last 5 years, it's not only western international companies that have suffered from this, but also many non-state-owned local companies. At the beginning of 2010,
state owned capitals have rushed into two industries: coal mining and real estate, and ebb non-state ones out of the game.
The shareholders should thank google for pulling out since I don't think the ROI is strong enough to keep Google in China.
> @greenlblue: Don't native corporations in China have an interest in keeping Google out? I suspect their license will not be renewed.
Mind you that the largest search engine Baidu.com is not a Chinese company at all. But they managed to 'brand' themselves as a "national brand" and gain supports from governments.
It's easy to think of China as a multi-core Hilter country but it's not. It's true that the 9-people Politburo has the power to set the rules but they're only the top of the iceberg. There are HUGE amount of low level officials, about 5% - 15% population, that actually rule the country using more morale codes rather than laws.
...this is, after all, the country that invented the large-scale bureaucratic state.
I have troubles understanding this. So the Hong Kong servers are not censored, but they are also not blocked by the Chinese firewall? Or how does it all work? If the Hong Kong servers are neither blocked nor censored, where is the problem?
I wonder if Google has the proper Party connections to keep this mischief going — I suspect with the shenanigans they're playing they either don't or don't care about keeping them. There appear to be too many forces against them for this to keep up for much longer.
I don't think this changes much - Google isn't really going dark in China, people will just have to type in google.com (which many of them probably already do) or google.com.hk.
I think much of the damage from Google pulling out has already been done - I know people who've switched back to Baidu because they find little things about Google HK frustrating (for example, Google.cn used to mimic Baidu in that you didn't need to control click to open a search result in a new tab - that was the default - Google HK behaves like Google US does).
I remember they sometimes set "open results in a new window" option by default for new users (those without Google's cookies). But not always, so it seems like they're split testing it.
Seems like they just want something to say to their investors when they have to leave China. If the government fucks them over, it's not Google's fault. If Google just leaves, then their shareholders might be upset.
Not necessarily. Other people in this thread have stated that google is unlikely to see its license removed. If that's the case, there is some benefit to going through the motions of compliance, to make the eventual denial seem less reasonable.
Why don't Google stick with its claim and just leave instead of dicking around with letter of the law or spirit of the law? That sounds like a capitalist pig instead of a moral crusader.
So is this marketing PR speak for, we're not going to withdraw from China, instead we're going to censor our search results, except in an even more broad and drastic way?
Doesn't seem to be. They're not censoring anything, as the redirect is still available. This more playing semantics with Chinese Gov't Policy while still making uncensored info available to those savvy enough to know to click a link (which should be pretty much everyone).
EDIT: Ahahahahah! The landing page: http://www.google.cn/landing/cnexp/indexd.html is really just an image that looks like a censored search. Every user would click it, and it then redirects. Amazingly cheeky! Hopefully the technologically illiterate bureaucrats there will see that it doesn't automatically redirect, and be satisfied without digging deeper. Hahahahaha.
