Google+ Not Actually Blocked in China, Just Being Slowly Throttled

Google+ is not actually blocked in China, contrary to reports today from the WSJ, TechCrunch and some other western media. Right now Google+ is accessible, but slow, for me here in mainland China.

What’s going on then? Well, pinging plus.google.com – try it with this ping tool – displays “packets lost” followed by a percentage figure. If it’s 100% of info packets being lost, then it’s very likely blocked, but if the number is lower, it’s likely just being throttled, or having some other issue. Perhaps this is where the others jumped to the conclusion.

Pinging plus.google.com on my Mac using Network Utility gives the result, “15 packets transmitted, 11 packets received, 26.7% packet loss.” Also, doing a ‘traceroute’ reveals the site to be very slow, but accessible. (Click here to see my ping test screenshot, or click here for the traceroute one).

Web throttling is a tactic new to China’s Great Firewall, and has been seriously slowing pretty much all overseas internet speeds all year. Gmail particularly has been horribly throttled, to the point were it can take five or ten minutes or more to go from the login page to your inbox. It’s a very underhanded tactic by Net Nanny: being seen not to block the service, whilst actually rendering it nearly useless to its users.

The signal that authorities seem to be sending out – with Gmail, Google+, and any other foreign website – is, “Meh, you’re Chinese, use our own websites and read our own news. Look, Gmail’s slow and rubbish anyway.”

(See also: Here’s a list of websites blocked in China)

If there’s a Buzz, it’ll be blocked

I have it from a good source who works in the VPN business that some Google+ IP addresses match those of YouTube, making it inevitable that Google+ will fail to resolve on some occasions from mainland China. But for now it is unblocked, and working not too slowly.

It’s possible that if Google+ doesn’t gain too much traction, then it might not be unilaterally blocked by the Great Firewall. Indeed, Google Buzz survives to this day, as its user numbers in China were presumably so tiny as to be of no concern to authorities.

Google’s Transparency Report website hasn’t been updated to include Google+, but remains a useful tool for seeing how countries disrupt a number of Google’s products. At the moment in China, Gmail is unblocked but insanely slow, while a lot of its other web apps, such as Docs, Picasa, are totally inaccessible.

Let’s hear from you readers on this subject… My colleague Rick in Japan started a crowd-sourced report on HerdictWeb of where Google+ is working (my own report from China is shown in the screenshot, above), and you can click here to report on Google Plus’ worldwide availability too.