http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/nov/09/google-services-blocked-china-gmail

Google services blocked in China

Google has said that some of its online services have been blocked within China after the country’s one in a decade meeting to transfer power to a new generation. Ben Quinn informs the audience that Traffic’s services in China dropped dramatically on Friday evening, after the ‘Transparency Report” (that is operated by Google, measuring the traffic sites worldwide.  Quinn says that some of Google’s search engines that were affected were engines such as Gmail. The spokeswomen for Google said that they have “checked and there’s nothing wrong on our end”.

Nonetheless, Quinn uses a timeline of Google’s interlink with China to show the full extent of what is being blocked by the transfer of power. An example of these are how YouTube’s video service has been blocked and made ‘inaccessible in china since 2009” and how even in 2010 Google was  repositioned from China to Hong Kong after they had a political argument ‘over censorship and cyber-attacks’ that were said to have initiated within China.

Overall, Google has said that in May (of this year), it will be changing its search service within China to make sure that they warn users when they are ‘likely to trigger interference from the authorities and suggest ways around censorship.’

In My Opinion

In my Opinion, I believe that China has gone too far, using its dictatorship as a way of taking control of the citizens in china. We’ve always been aware that China has an excessive amount of control over the internet but blocking Google, (the most popular search engine) seems like a drastic action. I believe it’s a good idea to keep track of the usage via the internet as a safety precaution against explicit documents and terrorism. Yet, by taking it too far, creates a distinct differentiation between china and the rest of the world, and soon enough something has to give

Posted 2 days ago by niemah