Just one day after Google announced it would become the subsidiary of a new parent company called Alphabet, the new conglomerate’s website has already been blocked by mainland authorities.
Testifying to the responsiveness of China’s online censorship apparatus, the company’s website, abc.xyz, became inaccessible to Chinese web users less than 12 hours after the reorganisation announcement.
Blockedinchina.net shows abc.xyz is blocked in all monitored Chinese regions, including Beijing, Shenzhen, Inner Mongolia, and Heilongjiang and Yunnan provinces. Greatfire.org has also confirmed that abc.xyz is “100 percent blocked in China.”
Since the company withdrew from the mainland market in 2010 owing to a fallout with Beijing over censorship issues, Google’s full range of online services such as Gmail and the Google Play app store have all been banned in China.
Google shares rose 6.5 percent following the Monday announcement. News of the restructuring shook the tech world and was even reported in state-run news sources such as Xinhua, Global Times and People’s Daily—despite the fact that internet users were unable to access the new website.
