China blocks Google+ even before its launch

Invitations for the Google+ launch party haven’t even gone out yet, and China has already cancelled the festivities. Barely a day after Google unveiled its new social network platform that is in the “limited field trial” phase, China’s prickly internet administrators have blocked the site. The Internet tracking site GreatFireWallOfChina (named after the scrupulously paranoid and stunningly efficient Internet censorship mechanism in China)  reports that test results for the Google+ site failed in every major city in China. [caption id=“attachment_34029” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The block comes a day ahead of the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. Feng Li/Getty Images”]  [/caption] “No servers were able to reach (the) site. This means that (the) site is most likely NOT accessible from within mainland China,” it noted. Just Ping, another web-based ping service that uses a network with over 50 checkpoints worldwide, too reported that Shanghai was the only one of its test checkpoints where Google+ received a consistent “packets lost” alert. (Other checkpoints in other cities of the world too periodically reported similar alerts, but from all accounts they were momentary failings; in Shanghai’s case it appeared to be more consistent, pointing to a sustained failure to ping back.) With this, Google+ joins the long list of social networking sites – from Facebook to Twitter to YouTube – that have been blocked in China. For Google, this is just the latest chapter in the longstanding ordeal it faces in operating in China, given the heavyduty restrictions on information flows in place. Yet, even by standards of clinical efficiency that China’s internet police are famous for, this latest action is stunning. It comes just a day ahead of an important political anniversary in China: 1 July marks the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, for which elaborate patriotism-instilling celebrations – and a heightened security sweep — are in place. Unnerved by calls for an Arab Spring-like protest movement within China —which have so far evoked little by way of organised response — Chinese authorities have in recent months been cracking down hard on dissent and greased the levers of their internet censorship mechanism. The blocking of Google+ also comes days after Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt warned that Google faces the grim prospect of even more challenging tussles with governments over internet censorship — and perhaps even risks seeing its employees arrested or tortured. China is also wary of recent efforts by the US to put the Internet squarely at the centre of an “information war” to force open societies. Recently, the US State Department unveiled a project “modelled on a venture capital-style approach” to fund digital activist initiatives working to advance internet freedoms around the world. Just last month, the UN declared free and unhindered internet access as much a fundamental human right as, for instance, water or food. “Facilitating access to the Internet for all individuals, with as little restriction to online content as possible, should be a priority for all states,” the UN report stated. The lack of nuance in India Internet users in India have in recent days been agitated over creeping censorship in the Indian cyberspace — in the context of Google’s  Transparency Report that flagged several requests from Indian authorities to pull down content from Google’s many platforms, including YouTube and Blogger. Those anxieties are entirely legitimate — given India’s standing as a pluralistic democracy that protects free speech, and given that internet censorship, however fleeting, takes us down a slippery slope of illiberalism. Yet, the nuance that gets lost in such passionate, even emotional outpourings , is that with all its failings — and there are admittedly many failings — the Internet domain in India is freer than critics will acknowledge. The misplaced envy in India over all things Chinese doesn’t acknowledge the political ecosystem in which China operates, in particular, the heavy-handed restrictions on internet freedoms that  feisty internet users in India wouldn’t tolerate for even a day. It’s that same ecosystem that doesn’t even allow Google to acknowledge what kind of “content removal” notices it received from the Chinese authorities — because it is a “state secret”. As WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange — who isn’t exactly enamoured of Western governments —  noted earlier this year, “China is the worst offender” when it comes to censorship. “China has aggressive and sophisticated interception technology that places itself between every reader inside China and every information source outside China…” China’s Internet, as commentators have noted, actually works like an intranet – and as a parallel universe that works according to a different set of rules. And with its blocking even before its launch, Google+  has just learnt that it hasn’t secured admittance to that exclusive club in China.