Google tosses ball back into China's court

Instead of simply withdrawing from China, Google has decided to redirect traffic from google.cn to google.com.hk -- their site hosted out of Hong Kong. This version of Google hosts unfiltered results -- something that likely isn't too popular with Chinese officials.

Google saw lots of push-back from the Chinese government in response to their threat of shutting down the service cold turkey. So what did Google do? They have decided to let China make the call -- instead of shutting down the service themselves, it's now going to be up to China to pull the plug.

To keep track of the status of Google in China, Google has launched a website that makes it easy to see how things are going down. China already had been blocking some Google services, so seeing x's aren't too surprising -- but I'll be keeping my eyes on this page to see what's happening.