Google changes China access after Beijing objects

Google Inc said today it will stop automatically rerouting users of its China search site to its Hong Kong site after Beijing threatened the company with the loss of its Internet license.

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.

"They made it clear to us that they did not think the redirect was acceptable," said a Google spokeswoman, Jessica Powell. She declined to say what reasons the government gave for its objections.
    
Google still operates a music download service and several other features on Google.Cn that are not affected by filtering regulations and Powell said it wants those services to continue.
    
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." Users can click on that tab to move to the Chinese-language site in Hong Kong, which is a Chinese territory but has Western-style civil liberties with no Internet filtering.