Today the Chinese government has started to block all services provided by Google, including search, scholar google, google maps, gmail, google translate, and others.
Update II 11pm Beijing time: It appears that all google services are restored in Beijing. Either Google has complied with what the government was asking or the government was only giving Google "some color to see see."
I am in Beijing right now and I cannot get to my gmail account. After searching through my previously saved proxy server list, I finally got to my gmail through one of the proxy servers. Affected websites include all google sites and sites that use google services such as google analytics. Although my own experience is that the block is complete and effective, there has been report that some people in China have been able to get to google sites occasionally. It was rumoured that the software that the Chinese government is using to block google is also low quality similar to the infamous "Green Damn" web filtering software.
Chinese blogosphere has erupted in protests over blocking google, and is filled with discussions of how to bypass the block.
The official excuse for blocking google is that it returns pornographic links on usual daily searches. Here is a translation of a widely circulated Chinese post:
Recently, CCTV (Chinese Central TV) exposed Google for returning large amount of pornographic links for normal searches. An example that caused strong media reactions is that even a search for the word "son" returned pornography.
Below we show how Beijing framed Google:
It is well-known that Google keywords uses computer generated most popular recent searches for word clues. The "fifty cents" (people who were hired for 50c per hour to do goverment jobs) exploited this and massively searched for pornographic links on Google to frame Google.
- Someone were doing a massive search for pornography in the past few days. Single day hits of pornographic words increased by 5950% and monthly hits increased by several thousand fold.
- The increase in search traffic all came from Beijing.
- The increase in search was linear instead of a random normal distribution. In other words, these searches were organized.
I am sorry for not providing any links because I can only access the relevant sites from Beijing through proxy servers and I do not see the real urls.
Google, along with Yahoo and Microsoft, have so far coorporated with Beijing in censoring China's internet. It is time for these companies to think about whether it is in their best interest to continue to support such censorship.
Update: To clarify, I have no trouble getting news about Iran. There is no concerted effort by the government to block reports of Iranian protests. Blogosphere discussion is generally sympathetic to Iranian protests. Political sites such as Dailykos are not blocked either. So it's not clear to me what the motivation is behind this move to block all google services. I don't buy the argument that this is to fight pornography because no sane person would consider maps.google.com or scholar.google.com or translate.google.com pornographic sites.