BEIJING -- A Google question-and-answer page for Chinese users was inaccessible from mainland China on Tuesday less than a month after the search giant's Internet license was renewed amid a dispute over online censorship.
The company found no technical problems with the Hong Kong-based service, said a Google Inc. spokewoman, Courtney Hohne, in an e-mail. Phone calls to China's Internet regulator, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, were not answered and the agency did not respond to questions sent by fax.
Beijing encourages Web use for education and business but tries to block material deemed subversive and closely watches sites where China's public can leave comments. Regulators block access to social networking sites abroad such as Facebook that pro-democracy and Tibet activists have used to criticize the communist government.
Google's future in China has been uncertain since the company announced in January it no longer wanted to cooperate with Beijing's Web censorship and shut down its China-based search engine in March. Mainland Web surfers can reach Google's Chinese-language site in Hong Kong, which has no online censorship, but industry analysts say users might defect to local rivals, eroding its advertising revenues.
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