China Blocks Gmail

[george]

Google accuses China of blocking Gmail

China has reportedly stepped up efforts to block virtual private network (VPN) services, with Gmail users in the country said to be experiencing slow and limited access.

BEIJING, CHINA: The rivalry between the Chinese Communist government and the search engine giant Google went up to new stage after Google accusing China's Left government of blocking its popular email service, Gmail.

Google, on Monday, Mar 21, said in a statement that Chinese government is interfering with Gmail, making it difficult for Chinese users to access the service. Google said that its engineers are unable to find any technical problems with the Gmail or it's website.

"There is no technical issue on our side; we have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail," Google said in a brief statement.

Google said that they are receiving complaints from Chinese users since end of Jan 2010. Many Chinese Google users are not able to access the Gmail or some face difficulty in sending mails.

The effort is reportedly tied to the "Jasmine Revolution," a call for Chinese citizens to protest the country's lack of reforms. The movement picked up steam online and via Twitter and was compared to similar efforts in the Middle East, but as Time reported, the Chinese government quickly cracked down on any anti-government activity.

Google's Apps Dashboard shows no disruption with Gmail in the past few days, save for a brief downtime on March 17.

The move comes about eight months after China renewed Google's Internet content provider license amidst a battle over censored search results. In July, Google announced a hybrid approach to search in the region.

To avoid losing its license in China, Google said it would stop completely re-directing all Google.cn traffic through its Hong Kong site and instead reinstate the Google.cn landing page.

The search component is still an unfiltered option going through Google.com/hk, while other Google.cn services that have traditionally been unfiltered, like music and text translate, will be available via Google.cn.

That came after Google discovered that cyber attacks originating in China had tried to gain access to Google intellectual property as well as the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

In December, China declared that all Internet phone services other than those provided by the two state-run telcos, China Telecom and China Unicom, were illegal.

Earlier, citing the security reasons, Chinese government had taken strict restrictions on Google search engine and other popular websites like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. During the 'Jasmine Revolution' campaign, a Middle East like revolt plan, China imposed Web censorship and deployed large number of police in various parts of the country.

Google officials said the blocking appears to be more sophisticated than other problems experienced by users in the past because the disruption is not a complete block.

In addition, a March 11 blog post by Google about security said the company had "noticed some highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a specific target." In the posting, Google declined to elaborate on which activists had been targeted or where the attacks had come from.

-- Agencies 2011-03-22