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Gmail Access Starts To Come Back In China, State-Run Paper Blames Google

Posted by timothy on from the organized-crime-with-jails-and-guns dept.

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.

8 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Blame is arguable. by gurps_npc · · Score: 5, Insightful
    That is, if those slaves don't obey, the whipping they get is their own fault.

    Similarly, if Google doesn't obey all of China's laws and their service is cut off, it must be their fault, correct?

    --
    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
  2. So why'd it come back online? by mrchaotica · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    --

    "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    1. Re:So why'd it come back online? by jmcvetta · · Score: 4, Funny

      Perhaps Google's attorney had lunch with the head Chinese censor and "forgot" to carry home his briefcase full of unmarked, non-sequential large bills.

    2. Re:So why'd it come back online? by swillden · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.)

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    3. Re:So why'd it come back online? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I live in China. This is an ongoing attack on Google. It is not just email - Google fonts are blocked too. The poster is right about degraded services.

      With the possible xception of Wechat, ther is no Chinese internet service that would have survived without the government blocking outside entities such as Twitter, Facebook etc.

    4. Re:So why'd it come back online? by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's probably affecting their own commerce... especially if you're a western businessman traveling through China and you can't access your own email.
      Many companies large and small use Gmail's servers for their own email service.

      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.

  3. If a tree falls in a forest... by DarthVain · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is likely China trying to exert its muscle to support Baidu the dominate search engine in China. China and Google have already butted heads about censorship in the past and Google withdrew services from China as a result.

    However the actions here go beyond the borders of China, in that it influences international trade, in that if I can't use Gmail to contact my clients in China, I would be forced to use something different.

    I would suspect that Google as a result highlighted this very fact to several jurisdictions heavily involved with trade with China, including the US, who no doubt sent very carefully worded messages to the Chinese government regarding what they thought of this trade influencing practice and how it relates to current treaties. To which I am sure China said, "Whoops!", blamed it on Google not meeting their laws, and promptly flipped the switch to turn it back on.

    What did this all accomplish? Not much. However China made it pretty clear that it has the capability to flip a switch and totally cut off someone from their market if they so choose... Which is a pretty nice stick to wave about belligerently.

  4. Service restored? Umm, not via my ISPs (tested 3) by QQBoss · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.