For months, access to the world’s largest email service was continually disrupted across China. Now, it is being reported that Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) Gmail has been completely blocked, and the Great Firewall is getting the blame for this lack of access, according to GreatFire.org, a China-based freedom of speech advocacy group.
An enormous amount of web addresses were shut off Friday and users are still reporting outages as of Monday. Data from the Google Transparency Report, a report that shows real-time traffic to a suite of Google applications, further showed that there was a steep decline in Gmail traffic in China.
In order to circumvent this troubling issue, businesses and individuals will have to employ virtual private networks (VPNs), especially since corporations utilize Gmail as their primary email accounts. VPNs permit users to bypass the Great Firewall, but the government has already rolled out some mechanisms to squash this measure.
This has been transpiring since the summer. Nearly all of the search engine’s programs have been affected in some way for the past six months. With the Chinese government maintaining strict control over the Internet as a way to control dissent and tackle any forms of negative attacks against the state, many are pointing the blame to Beijing.
What is very interesting is the fact that China currently has the world’s most sophisticated Internet censorship program: The Great Firewall. Those who have argued against this adoption say that the Communist Party has greatly enhanced its attacks of foreign online services in an attempt to isolate itself from the rest of the world.
“I think the government is just trying to further eliminate Google’s presence in China and even weaken its market overseas,” said a member of GreatFire.org in an interview with Reuters. “Imagine if Gmail users might not get through to Chinese clients. Many people outside China might be forced to switch away from Gmail.”
Hua Chunying, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson, told reporters at a news conference that she did not have any idea what was going on.
“China has consistently had a welcoming and supportive attitude towards foreign investors doing legitimate business here,” she said. “We will, as always, provide an open, transparent and good environment for foreign companies in China.”
Experts say that China has a variety of tools in its arsenal to limit access to online content.
“China has a number of ways they can block content. One of the crudest ways is to just block an IP address, and when you do that, you block all the content available at the IP,” Earl Zmijewski, Dyn’s vice-president of data analytics, told Mashable.
This could very well be the biggest attack that Google has ever faced in East Asia. In June, ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, an array of Google services, including Google+, Gchat and Drive were all shut down. In addition, it has been discovered that Weibo, the nation’s version of Twitter, can delete posts in real time, while China has actually blocked Instagram during the intensive Hong Kong protests.
Ostensibly, tech authors are writing about the instability of the Internet in Asia. For the past month, the public has been inundated with reports on the attack against Sony by allegedly the North Korean government because of the film “The Interview,” a comedy about a television host being tapped by the CIA to assassinate the Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. North Korea also lost its Internet connection earlier this month.
