TAIPEI, Taiwan – Chinese authorities stepped up their censorship of the Internet by blocking websites using Verizon Communication’s cloud service, a show of power just as the country is poised to host a global Internet conference.
Filtering of sites on the EdgeCast content delivery network escalated this week “with no rhyme or reason as to why,” the Santa Monica, California-based company said in a blog post. Methods typically targeting politically sensitive websites such as Freeweibo.com have this time also affected commercial sites, including that of Sony Mobile.
“It only shows that the Chinese authorities see Internet content control on top of the list,” Lento Yip, chairman of the Hong Kong Internet Service Providers Association, said in an e- mail. “Given they block Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, it is not a surprise that they can bear this ‘collateral damage’ to block CDNs.”
The government of China, which has the world’s largest Internet population, regularly blocks and filters content from local and overseas websites to keep a tight rein on citizens’ access to information. The latest actions come as China holds a coming-out party in eastern Wuzhen for domestic Internet titans Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings and Baidu.
EdgeCast provides services that distribute content to consumers via multiple servers across the Internet. All sub- domains of edgecastcdn.net were blocked in China, affecting clients including Sony Mobile and The Atlantic magazine, Greatfire.org— a researcher monitoring online censorship— said in a separate blog post.
“Only users in China who were attempting to access a subset of our customer’s websites were impacted,” Lauren Mitchell, a spokeswoman for EdgeCast, said in an e-mailed response to questions, declining to say how many sites are affected. “Our global delivery outside of China was not impacted.”
This week’s escalation uses DNS poisoning, a method of interrupting how traffic is directed to websites and the servers hosting them, Greatfire said Tuesday. The attack shows authorities are “attempting to cut China off from the global Internet,” Greatfire said.
Greatfire takes advantage of the growing popularity of cloud computing to create copies of banned sites hosted outside China, mostly on cloud servers of Amazon Web Services, an arm of the Seattle-based e-commerce giant Amazon.com.
Freeweibo.com, a website created by Greatfire in 2012, tracks posts censored on China’s largest microblog site, Weibo.com. While Chinese Internet users can post whatever they want on Weibo, those posts are deleted when they contain information deemed sensitive or inappropriate.
Yet China’s Internet regulator has targeted cloud service providers before, Yip said.
“The Chinese authority has increased its grip on various blockings and content filters since a few months ago,” he said in the e-mail.
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