Is China’s Internet Becoming an Intranet? | ChinaFile

A few months ago my friends in China told me they can't access their gmail accounts, so please use their university addresses.  For a couple of years they cannot reach my blogs which are all on the Google blogspot platform. So they can't reach my research or teaching materials.  This is a serious obstacle to free academic exchange.- gwc
Is China’s Internet Becoming an Intranet? | ChinaFile:

Why now? We have seen a rapid ramping up of censorship controls in China since last June. This is just a further, logical step. The authorities are hellbent on establishing cyber sovereignty in China. If you look at what has taken place since last summer it is quite astounding:

Google got blocked completely last June for the first time. Gmail got blocked completely for the first time in December. Since October, the authorities have launched attacks on Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Apple, putting sensitive user information at risk and in turn making Chinese netizens suspicious of using foreign services. The authorities have severely disrupted or outright blocked many foreign content delivery networks (CDNs or cloud services) including Amazon S3, Akamai and EdgeCast. This blocking has caused much collateral damage, including, but not limited to, taking HSBC’s corporate banking portal offline which made it impossible for foreign and domestic firms to move money into and out of China and blocking access to the download link for iTunes, just after Apple released the newest iPhone. We can now clearly say that censorship in China is a business issue as well as an internet freedom issue.

This ramping up of censorship and malicious attacks drive internet users to adopt circumvention tools. By blocking these tools, the authorities are leaving people with fewer options and are forcing most to give up on circumvention and switch to domestic services. If they can convince more internet users to use Chinese services - which they can readily censor and easily snoop on - then they have taken one further step towards cyber sovereignty. They won’t need to ask Yahoo to hand over user information again. They won’t need to ask Apple to remove apps from their app store again. They won’t need to ask LinkedIn to self-censor negative China content on its platform again. Why? Because nobody inside of China will be using any of these services anymore and/or be able to access them.

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