When you consider how much of our working lives revolve around accessing web-based applications and services, the performance hit is clear. It’s no coincidence that content delivery firm Akamai ranked China 91st in its most recent State of the Internet report for Q4 2012, with an average connection speed of just 1.8Mbps. The Great Firewall can also slow internet traffic down to cripplingly low speeds – sometimes deliberately in an attempt to dissuade web surfers from visiting certain sites like Google search and Gmail. It’s not just the hassle of having to connect to a VPN which is affecting the productivity of MNC workers in China, however. These alternative VPN protocols apparently use the same ports used by traditional eCommerce sites, and so can’t really be touched by the authorities without them shutting down a large part of the Chinternet. In particular, the OpenVPN protocol is said to be blocked completely now, although providers have sidestepped to use PPTP and L2TP. Foreign VPN providers like Astrill and Privax found a few months back that the Great Firewall had begun closing ports used by these services. More concerning still for foreign companies in China is that their main method of bypassing the country’s repressive censorship regime – the Virtual Private Network (VPN) – has also come under threat.
“This is an example of censorship at its worst - users suspect their search term might get blocked before they search but instead of a censorship notice they are led to believe that what they are searching for is not sensitive, plus not many people are saying anything interesting about the keyword anyway,” Greatfire argued in a blog post.Īlthough the tinkering has stopped for now, it could be switched on again at a moment’s notice and is symptomatic of the way things are heading behind the Great Firewall. Previously, if users searched for blocked keywords such as “Tiananmen Square incident” they would be greeted with a standard message, roughly translated as: “According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, search results for cannot be displayed.” However, according to, Sina had been experimenting with an alternative approach where instead of an outright block, some carefully selected results are allowed through. Last month, not-for-profit body noticed that one of the biggest social media platforms – microblogging firm Sina – had been tinkering with results to provide a much more subtle, insidious method of censoring content. It’s cheaper this way, as the cost of extra manpower and web monitoring technology must be borne by the private companies in question, and failure to comply could mean they are shut down.
One of the main ways they control the vast ‘Chinternet’ is by pressuring social media sites to self-censor. Despite the once-in-a-decade handover of power to a fresh political elite headed by new president Xi Jinping, the authorities have, if anything, stepped up their censorship regime. Yet for multi-national businesses operating within China, it has become an increasingly onerous task of late to stay one step ahead of the censors and use the internet in the manner for which it was originally intended. Built over almost a decade and allegedly manned by tens of thousands of government employees, it’s the most successful attempt by any nation to block IP addresses and monitor and filter online content on a massive scale. You don’t have to be a fan of the Chinese Communist Party to admire, from a purely technological and organisational perspective, the world’s most advanced internet censorship regime – the Great Firewall of China.