Thursday, June 25, 2009

Google Back Online in China

As predicted last night, Google is back online. The national outage was temporary and the internet is abuzz with speculation about the reasons for the blackout.

There is no official version from either side at this point, but many are theorizing that it was somehow related to the "Great Firewall of China". The firewall, also known as the Green Dam, is a national project recently implemented to protect children and citizens from unhealthy content (primarily pornographiy and propaganda). A lot of big guns are complying with the new requirements (lenovo, HP, etc).

Google has been pretty good about modifying its services for Chinese consumption, but rumor has it, China got annoyed when they noticed that english language searches done over on www.google.cn were returning content Google had agreed to disallow.

It looks like China is throwing its weight around. It is unknown if Google made any changes to be turned back on.

I'm just glad I have my Gmail back!