Gmail’s China block adds to concerns over Internet censorship

A four-day outage of Google’s Gmail service in mainland China was at least partly lifted, but not before the apparent act of Internet censorship had provided the final restrictive flourish to a year in which global online freedoms had a notable setback.

The unusual total severing of the Google email service ended as mysteriously as it had begun -- users of Gmail via POP and IMAP servers, who had been frustrated for days trying to send and receive email, suddenly saw their inboxes full again, though some were still reporting delays in receiving emails and others said that their service had not returned. The episode left questions about the breadth and scope of China’s notorious “Great Firewall” and underlined the vulnerability of international communication services to disruption. An executive at one big US Internet company said the interruption to Gmail marked a familiar pattern in China’s periodic online crackdowns, but added that other repressive governments had this year shown they are “increasingly concerned about the opportunities the internet has given to their citizens.”