By Star Chang, posted Jul 4, 2011 at 5:29 PM, 684 views,

Will China Block Google+?

While tons of people haven’t even gained access to the Google+ field trial yet, the Chinese authorities already having a sign of blocking Google’s brand new social networking project. Google+ is the social extension of Google, its features focus on making online sharing easy for users, and it is made to compete with Facebook. China isn’t too keen on U.S. social networks and block services such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Right now, Google+ is still accessible in China, but the connection is very slow due to web throttling, a new tactic to the China’s Great Firewall…

UPDATE: We have an answer today, according to Penn Olson’s latest report, Google+ now is behind the GFW. Looks like the service has been banned before getting popularize, for sure, the Chinese government is absolutely neurotic!

Web throttling has been seriously slowing down all overseas internet speeds in China, especially Gmail. It has been horribly throttled, and the end result is your account will take five to ten minutes to login to your inbox, and it will even get attacked by Chinese hacker which is supported by Chinese military. It’s a very underhanded tactic by being seen not to block the service, but actually make it very inconvenient to use. In the end, China’s internet users will favor local web services more and result an unpleasant experience to those foreign ones which are slow and unhandy.

China is not blocking the Google+ for now, but is throttling the speed of the site so greatly that it may as well be unavailable. It isn’t too surprising for the censoring to take place, since Google is not in a good relationship terms with the Chinese authorities. If Google+ doesn’t gain too much attention in China, then it might not be blocked by the Great Firewall. Indeed, Google Buzz can be accessed in China to this day, as its user numbers were presumably so small as to be of no concern to the authorities. At the meantime, services from Google which are totally blocked in China include YouTube, Blogger, Picasa web Albums, Google maps and last but not least, the Google search (www.google.com).

With over 420 million Internet users, China is indeed a lucrative market for any Internet companies. But strict controls from the Chinese government have so far worked towards Chinese-based technology companies’ favor. Facebook, the world’s largest social-networking site is banned in China. This has given Renren, a Facebook clone, an opportunity to capture the Chinese market and currently has over 120 million users. If Google+ is straightly aiming at Facebook, to become another popular social-networking site, we believe Google+ will be undoubtedly behind the GFW, just like Facebook. The Chinese government is always neurotic on any form of social-networking site to call for protests, thus if the information flow inside Google+ could not keep under surveillance, the service will have no chance to be present in China.

Source: Penn Olson, TechCrunch, New York Daily News