When Google announced early this year that it had been the victim of a cyber attack that resulted in compromised Gmail accounts and stolen IP, the search giant threatened to leave the Chinese market.

Google later backed up that threat a bit by redirecting Chinese searchers to the less censored Hong Kong page automatically. Late in June Google stopped automatically redirecting Chinese searchers to the Hong Kong version of Google in what was seen as a clear concession to the Chinese government in an attempt by Google to ensure that its license to operate in China was renewed.

Reuters reports that Google has now confirmed that China did renew its license to operate within the country. A Google spokesperson stated, "China has renewed our license. We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP license and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China."

Google also announced that it was firing its Street View fleet back up. The fleet was sidelined while Google fixed the issue that allowed the Street View fleet to capture payload data from unsecured wireless networks. The capture of the payload data by the Google vehicles has already resulted in lawsuits.

Google still maintains that it captured the payload data unknowingly and that the data was never used in any Google products. There are investigations underway in several countries into the capture of the payload data. Google claims that the data recording capabilities of the Street View fleet were used to capture SSIDs and MAC addresses only.