BEIJING: China has blocked the last remaining way to access Google’s popular e-mail service, experts said on Monday, as authorities work to establish “Internet sovereignty” by controlling what enters the country via the web.

Gmail, the world’s biggest e-mail service, has been largely inaccessible from within China since the run-up to the 25th anniversary in June of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators. But users could still access the service by using third-party mail applications, rather than the webpage.

“But they have blocked those ways of accessing,” said Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of Danwei, a Beijing-based firm that tracks Chinese media and the Internet. “I think this is pretty confirmed. It is now already four, five days, so this is real,” he said.

Analysts say China operates the world’s most extensive and sophisticated Internet censorship system and routinely blocks foreign websites.

“There is an increasingly aggressive attitude towards what they (Beijing) call ‘Internet sovereignty’ and they are confident about talking about Internet censorship in positive terms,” Goldkorn added. “The past two years have seen a consistent tightening of all kinds of censorship on the Internet and media”.

A graph showing Internet traffic from China accessing Gmail dropped sharply on Friday, according to Google’s Transparency Report, and has not returned to normal levels.

Published in Dawn, December 30th, 2014