Google says China services back up
BEIJING — Google said Friday its services appeared to be back up and running normally in China, after the US web giant reported that access to its search engine and other…
BEIJING — Google said Friday its services appeared to be back up and running normally in China, after the US web giant reported that access to its search engine and other products were being blocked.Google and the Chinese government have for months been locked in a battle over state censorship and cyberattacks that the company says originated in China, the world's largest online market with 420 million users.On Thursday, a Google web page listed search, Google Ads and Google Mobile as "fully blocked" in China for the first time in weeks. News and images were "partially blocked".The apparent blockage raised concerns that Beijing could still be unhappy despite changes made by the company in order to secure the renewal of its Internet Content Provider licence in China.But the company said Friday that the blockage report had perhaps been an overstatement."Because of the way we measure accessibility in China, it's possible that our machines can overestimate the level of blockage," the company said in a statement emailed to AFP."That appears to be what happened last night when there was a relatively small blockage. It appears now that users in China are accessing our properties normally."AFP attempts to access Google web search on the mainland were intermittently successful on Friday.The company also cautioned that its page that details accessibility in China -- google.com/prc/report.html -- was not a "real-time tool". A notice on the site says the report is updated "at least once a day".Gmail was the only Google service that was listed as "fully or mostly accessible". Other Google products, such as YouTube, have been blocked in China for months.In January, Google said it would no longer censor search results in China and threatened to completely shut down its local operations over what it said were cyberattacks aimed at the email attacks of Chinese human rights activists.In March, it effectively shut down its Chinese search engine, automatically re-routing mainland users to its uncensored site in Hong Kong.But
last modification 2010-07-30 05:30:02
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