China's internet censorship system, which is popularly known as the Great Firewall, has initiated a blanket ban (total ban) of Google's Gmail (free email service), as reported by Duowei News, a US-based Chinese political news website.
Several News sources are claiming that Google's free email service has been totally cut off in China from Friday, with traffic to Gmail's Servers falling to nearly zero on Saturday. Gmail users said that the service was still down as of Monday.
Gmail was recently censored in China in Mid-June 2014, just prior to the 25th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Student Protests, when all the Google services were severely affected, leading to a steep downfall in traffic to Google's servers.
On Sunday, netizens wrote on Sina Weibo, Chinese equivalent of Twitter, that unlike previous Gmail bans, where only specific routes to Google's Gmail IP were blocked, this time all routes have been totally cut off, meaning Chinese netizens can't access gmail even by using proxy IPs or using IP Jumps.
Gmail is often said to be unreliable in China anyway, forcing users who are not accustomed to jumping the Great Firewall using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to resort to dedicated mail applications to access their Gmail accounts. However, the current ban has also shut down Google's POP/SMTP internet protocols, meaning Gmail is now completely inaccessible across web browsers as well as all the mail applications on PCs and smartphones.
Google's search engine, which had been blocked in China since early 2010, was briefly uncensored in China on the afternoon of December 15, only to be censored again later that very evening. Initially, it was speculated that China had finalized a deal with Google during a visit to the United States by Lu Wei, chief of the Chinese State Council's Information Office and Head of the General Office of the Central Leading Group for Internet Security & Information.
Some netizens speculate that the upgrade is linked to the upcoming National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference scheduled for March 2015.
The increased censorship appears to have achieved its desired effect, with many netizens declaring on Sina Weibo that they are abandoning Google products and services altogether on a massive scale.
One netizen said that he "felt sick" from the inconvenience that has been caused by the current ban, while another netizen commented that China might as well censor all foreign information available on the internet and "become just like North Korea."
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