Reporters Without Borders has condemned China for allegedly blocking Google.com.:

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the current unprecedented level of Internet filtering in China, which means the Google.com search engine can no longer be accessed in most provinces - although the censored Chinese version, Google.cn, is still accessible - and software designed in the United States to get round censorship now only works with great difficulty.

The organisation also deplored the fact that the 17th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June has been used to tighten the vice on Chinese Internet users.
“It was only to be expected that Google.com would be gradually sidelined after the censored version was launched in January,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Google has just definitively joined the club of western companies that comply with online censorship in China. It is deplorable that Chinese Internet users are forced to wage a technological war against censorship in order to access banned content.”
Internet users in many major Chinese cities have had difficulty in connecting to the uncensored international version of Google for the past week. The search engine was totally unaccessible throughout the country on 31 May. The blocking then gradually extended to Google News and Google Mail. So the Chinese public is now reduced to using the censored Chinese versions of these services.

There are problems with Google’s service but these are being massively overstated by RSF.

Google and G-Mail services are still working fine here at AsiaPundit Global Headquarters in Shanghai. There were intermittent outages last week, but there was nothing of the sort that indicated a firewall-level block. Beijing residents had a more prolonged outage, although AP understands that this has largely been resolved. The comments at the Peking Duck indicate no blockage in South China.

AP has also heard, indirectly, confirmation that Beijing was raising the level of its filtering ahead of the June 4th anniversary. Other services such as an overseas hosted POP e-mail account were also inaccessible last week, and general internet service was sluggish.

Still, there was a particular problem with Google. Andrew Lih has done very solid tracking of the problem here and here. China Web 2.0 Review, meanwhile, notes that Chinese users were frustrated with Google over the inaccessibility of the uncensored site.:

Difficulty in accessing Google: From a week ago, Chinese internet users in north China started to encounter difficulty in accessing Google and other service as Gmail. Will Google.com finally become inaccessible, and all the traffic has to change to Google.cn? On the other hand, Chinese bloggers are discontented with Google China’s official blog, since it did not have any explanation on the issues.

Google won’t say this on its official blog, but for those looking for a simple explanation, this works well:

“Google was inaccessible because the Chinese government is run by a bunch of absolute berks who annually screw up the country’s communications infrastructure to prevent its citizens from being reminded that they are ruled by thugs. Normal service will hopefully resume shortly after June 4.”

In other Google news, co-founder Sergey Brin has said that the company may have made a mistake with its China service, and has realized that no one in the country uses the censored service.:

Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged Tuesday the dominant Internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course. (…)
“We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference,” Brin said. (…)
“Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense,” Brin said. (…)
Brin said Google is trying to improve its censored search service, Google.cn, before deciding whether to reverse course. He said virtually all the company’s customers in China use the non-censored service.

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