Google accuses China of disrupting Gmail

Google has accused the Chinese authorities of disrupting its e-mail service inside the country, adding a new twist to the stand-off over censorship that has bedeviled the US company’s attempts to push into the world’s most populous Internet market.

The claim by the Internet giant followed weeks of sporadic problems encountered by Internet users in mainland China as the government tightened its censorship measures in light of an anonymous online call for a “Jasmine Revolution” in China. “This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail,” a Google spokesperson said. The problems that have been reported to take different forms, making it difficult to trace a pattern in the precise nature of the faults, the types of Gmail user affected, or the length of the time the issues have been experienced. Some users, for instance, have said they periodically fail to send, search or load e-mail, even though they can access their accounts, which gives the impression that the fault lies with Google. In other instances, users in China have been unable to log into Gmail or even access the Gmail site.