Great Firewall in action

Waiting for a letter from China: with the start of the 18th Communist Party Congress, access to Google was restricted.

Transparency report is a product that provides information about traffic to Google services in the form of historical data for a specific geographic region or a specific service. The graphs are updated after the data is collected, normalized and scaled. Where there is a sharp change in user behavior, Google claims that there may be a disruption to the free flow of information, either due to a government blockage or a broken cable.

According to this Internet Transparency Report, there has been a significant slowdown in Internet traffic to the company's services coming from China over the past few days.

Source: Google Transparency Report

The decline in levels began on 09.11.12 (an unusual sharp drop at point F on the graph), and they returned to their previous values from yesterday. The period coincides with the ^18th Congress of the Communist Party of China, which began on 08 November. This gives rise to the assumption that the “Great Chinese censorship”, colloquially called the Great Firewall, is in operation. Sites that specifically monitor such types of jamming, such as greatfire.org, claim that this is the largest censorship of Chinese users imposed so far, because it includes restricting access even to Gmail, which is rare for the Chinese authorities.

Despite its problems with the authorities, Google continues to expand its offices in China in an attempt to capitalize on the market opportunities in China. The total lack of freedom of speech is becoming an increasingly big problem for the country as the new internet generation grows up. Such silencing shows the absurdity of the party's control at all costs.

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