Google Rises, Baidu Falls on China News

Google story updated with additional background information and closing stock prices.
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- After months of withdrawal from China over censorship disputes, Google(GOOG) has renewed the operating license for its web site in the country -- all the while appearing to have lost its fight for Internet freedom in order to hold onto a piece of the world's largest internet market.

"We are very pleased that the government has renewed our license and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China," Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said his blog this morning.

To gain favor with China again -- as it sought to renegotiate its license in the country -- Google on Monday stopped redirecting traffic to its China google.cn site to it Hong Kong google.com.hk site. "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," Drummond had said.

It now instead offers the Hong Kong web site as a link on the China web, essentially re-exposing itself to Internet censorship in China.

"The Google.cn home page now offers only a link to its 'uncensored' Hong Kong site, but those searches are easily traced and China's firewall can then censor the results," as writer Dana Blankenhorn pointed out in a ZDNet article.

"No Google user searching in the Chinese language can thus access information about anything the government decides, on its whim, the people should not know about. That was the government's position all along."

"That position has been upheld."

Google's defiance of China in the name of Internet freedom appeared to be a losing battle from the start, receiving very little public support from U.S. corporations and investors.