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China Starts/Stops Blocking Google
shekared was one of a number of readers to write in to tell a similar story. He says "I'm an American currently living and working in Chongqing, China. As of 9am (UTC +8) China began blocking google.com, gmail.com, google analytics and many if not most other google sites other than google.cn. Internet speed for connections outside the mainland have in general have come to a crawl. Surprisingly this has yet to pick up major coverage in the press. Using an open proxy or VPN for connection to hosts outside of the mainland continues to allow access to google, as does connecting directly to a google.com IP address.
As of 6pm (UTC +8) access to gmail and google.com have returned to normal."
I find it interesting that their little "trial run" of blocking Google comes so soon after Bing decides to filter out anything sensitive (you know porn, skeletons, pandas) to China. So if we've got on big player playing ball, let the other one know what will happen to them if they don't. Another motive could be a a display of defiance to the West's requests to stop with all the blocking and blocking software? Maybe it's coincidence, maybe it's many factors.
My work here is dung.
It seems to me that google is one of the sites on the internet that make china's censorship work much more difficult. It's not hard to imagine that they'd like google gone for good. Unfortunately, google is a very real part of a lot of people's lives.
Is it possible that this (and other similar actions) are attempts to see if they would be able to get away with blocking google for a longer period of time, and not cause a mass uproar?
im traveling in china for the last 6 weeks and the state of internet connections here is very random.
domestic sites, like the immensely popular QQ and baidu, are always _very_ responsive.
google sometimes gets a slow down to the extend that it is nearly unusable (that really help people here to move over to the super fast and slightly more chineese friendly baidu).
the main thing is the randomness, if it is connectivity/ congestion issues, or some conspiracy: no-one knows.
Give them a week with no google, no gmail, no google maps, and see what kind of reaction the chinese government gets. Then say they can have their google back when they agree to stop blocking it.
After living in China for a while, I got the distinct impression that there was the "Great Wall" as well as local level monitoring and filtering (at least for foreigners). A couple doors down, there were always random people coming in and out of one of the apartments, and it would get quiet when my internet was being used. I had trouble accessing some sites, so one night I set everything up with encryption and Tor. The next morning, all of them were extremely distressed-looking and bleary eyed (the first time I saw them like that).
Circumstantial evidence to be sure, but that combined with other things makes me think that there are two levels of monitoring/filtering in China, a possible reason for regional inconsistencies...
making google unreliable is a subtle argument for chinese citizens to depend upon chinese competitors to google, such as baidu
http://www.baidu.com/
does the outlay of that page look familiar to you?
for example, if my gmail account in china is unreliable- due to no fault of google, but unreliable nonetheless, that means i would tend to use some other email provider for that vital service. for baidu, all you have to do is have a fellow nationalist stooge in the government hit the flicker switch on google's traffic every now and then. since china is filtering everything anyway via centralized national authority, that's not hard to arrange
its a subtle and effective form of protectionism, something which the usa and other trading partners of china have noticed a severe uptick of recently, due to the global economic climate. which is especially hypocritical, since china, as a major exporter, is always complaining about protectionism
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/economy/24yuan.html
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How do you know it is not a DNS issue from your ISP? You can still access it through IP, don't you. If it is filtering, I doubt it can still working that way. Because it is in China, so any technical issue must be government doing evil.
walmart itself is a fascist dictatorship if you think about it.
Close, as various people have pointed out that it satisfies one of the primary features of fascism: The close ties between the business and your local government. (Yes, people in the US do mostly use "fascist" as an epithet that's empty of meaning, but the term has a historic definition. Close ties between government and business is one of the important pieces of that definition. Use of patriotism and religion rather than logic or science are the other major pieces. Sound familiar? ;-)
Part of the reason that Walmart and other "big box" stores can offer lower prices than the locally-owned stores is that in most cases, they don't pay local taxes. This was part of their agreement with the local government before they built their store. Before setting up a new store, they send people to negotiate with the local government agencies involved, and the main goal is to find the local town that will give them the best deal.
This normally means low taxes, and since they go with the lowest, it means that the towns are competing to see who can offer the lowest tax rate. Most of the time, that number is zero. This is usually specified as being for some number of years, so that the new business can "establish" themselves. But if the tax rate should go up, note that the "big box" really is just that. It's a big, cheap building that can be quickly abandoned if another nearby town should offer a better deal. This is part of why you see so many unoccupied buildings along the highways of the American landscape.
The tax-free (or nearly so) status of the big corporate stores is most of why they are able to undercut the local businesses on price and drive them out of business. If the big stores had to pay the same tax rate as the local businesses, they wouldn't be nearly so price competitive, and many of the local businesses would survive.
But the only way this can happen is if all the town governments in an area get together and agree to not give the big corporations lower taxes than local businesses. This is a version of the old "Prisoner's Dilemma" game, though. If just one town defects, it gets all the big stores. This puts subtle pressure on all the towns to defect, giving everyone the worst outcome in the PD game. And once this happens, you can't easily fix anything, because it requires everyone deciding to cooperate, and by the time that local politics gets to that point, all the local businesses have died out and the business leaders have moved away.
In many cases, of course, the local government is run by people who believe in the corporate world and think that it should be closely tied to the government. In that case, your local businesses don't really stand much of a chance; the fascists have won. Even if you can vote them out, it'll take you a long time to rebuild a local business community. It takes expertise to run a business, and if all the people with that expertise have moved away, it'll take years to train up a new set. And then it takes only one town getting into bed with a corporate giant to drive the small stores out of business yet again.
(Actually, you can learn a lot about all this by reading Adam Smith. It's not exactly a new story. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.