China confirms it has renewed Google’s internet licence.  Making the announcement on Google’s company blog, chief legal officer David Drummond said:

We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP licence and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China.

Google’s relationship with China has been strained since it announced in March that it would no longer censor its search services in China. Instead it began to redirect Chinese users to Google’s unfiltered Hong Kong site. In a bid to have its licence renewed last month the company redesigned its google.cn landing page. Instead of automatically redirecting them to the Hong Kong site, it now offers them a link to google.hk instead. Google chief legal officer David Drummond defended the change in direction saying that “Without an ICP licence, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn—so Google would effectively go dark in China.”