As you may well be aware, there has been a running battle between two super powers of late: one a real-world, tangible super power, China, and the other is an online force to be reckoned with, Google. Amid their respective and opposing stances on internet censorship, it was hoped that some sort of middle ground would be found, with Google initially acquiescing to China’s censorship policy; but things seem have taken a turn for the worst of late.
According to the Google service availability page, the web search functionality of the popular search engine has been “Fully Blocked” in China. Please note that the Google service availability page defines “Fully Blocked” as 67-100 percent of accessibility disruptions.
Also joining the list of “Fully Blocked” items that have been recently added are ‘Ads’ and ‘Mobile’ accessibility. Although, strangely, reports are coming in that Google search functionality is very much still alive and well in China, with folks theorising that it may simply be a server crash (thanks techcrunch). We’ll update this story as more information comes through.
UPDATE:
techcrunch is now reporting that this is all a false alarm and have received official word from Google that their search engine is not being blocked in China. Below is the official email from Google:
“Because of the way we measure accessibility in China, it’s possible that our machines could overestimate the level of blockage. That seems to be what happened last night when there was a relatively small blockage. It appears now that users in China are accessing our properties normally.
Please also note that the dashboard is not a real time tool.”
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