China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will need more time to review Google's licence application. Google recently applied to renew its licence to operate in China close to the end-of-June deadline, which is pushing back the approval process, the Wall Street Journal reports citing Wang Lijian, spokesman for the ministry. In June, Google also changed its strategy in China to save its licence after government criticism. Since January the company has been redirecting visitors to its local portal Google.cn to its Hong Kong site, Google.com.hk, so it can avoid having to filter results from its earch engine. However, the Chinese government has indicated that if it continues with this strategy, Google may lose its licence. So instead of automatically redirecting users to the Hong Kong site, Google is taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk, where users can conduct web searches or continue to use Google.cn services.
