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Gmail Access Starts To Come Back In China, State-Run Paper Blames Google
An anonymous reader writes Basic access to Gmail is starting to come back online in China on Tuesday after going down on Friday. The state-run Global Times China did not explain what caused the four-day outage, despite the fact that the government clearly implemented the block, and instead pointed to Google's unwillingness to obey Chinese law. All of Google's products have been severely disrupted in China since June. While users in Chinaare not able to access Gmail via the website, email protocols such as IMAP, SMTP, and POP3 had been accessible. The Great Firewall of China started blocking the IP addresses used by Gmail for these protocols, leaving users in China with no way of sending or receiving emails.
If Google was blocked for not obeying Chinese law, but isn't blocked anymore... then what principles did Google compromise in order to get unblocked?
I'm sure Google changed nothing at all.
My guess is that this is just an escalation of the strategy of service degradation China has used against Google for a long time. Blocking access entirely provokes anger and spurs people to find workarounds, but if you randomly and intermittently make stuff fail the targeted service just seems crappy, which motivates people to find other services. As I understand it, that's exactly what happened here: China only blocked one of the IP addresses in Google's MX record. Since STMP is a store-and-forward protocol, with retries, the impact would be to introduce delays and degrade reliability. Just blocking it for a few days is another way of implementing this strategy, since it shows users that the service is unreliable. What happened once may happen again. Or worse.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google but do not speak for Google and know nothing about this beyond what I read in the press. The information that only one of the MX IPs was blocked is something I read on Hacker News.)
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Their commerce, actually, not western commerce.
You see, a bunch of companies in China do business by email, and a LOT of them use gmail because it frees them from having to pay for their own email service. (And Asians generally are cheapskates - they'll get by trying to spend as little money as possible).
I've dealt with companies where their email system is a free Gmail account - you see username-company@gmail.com listed on their business cards or some variation thereof. Gmail is free, after all, so why bother paying for a domain and email server when people are willing to do it for free?
Likewise, some do it using qq.com or other free Chinese mail provider.
So yeah, turns out blocking gmail blocks a lot of companies from doing business.
I am in Beijing. I know not of this restored service of which TFA speaks. Anything Google related website-wise (and including other services, like Google Earth) have been blocked on the PC since July or so (as opposed to just slowed down to 1 Kbyte/minute previously) but Google's client on cell phones worked without a problem. What was blocked on Friday was the phone client and any other services not covered by the previous block. As of my posting this message, everything G is still only accessible for me via VPN- Freegate or paid, either works fine. Funny thing, though, if I use Freegate, I can't use any services at slashdot (I had to shut off FG so I could post this message and see how a comment I made in another thread had been moderated).
The only thing that I use frequently that is hit and miss functionally without a VPN is Google Translate, which I am guessing is because some big Chinese web sites claiming to do translation are actually just front ends to Google translate and thus stop working.