News of Google’s restructuring to Alphabet was carried by several state-run and state-funded Chinese media. Chinese netizens quickly caught the irony of the news being reported.
“What is Google? Is that a website?????” went a top rated comment on new state-funded Chinese news website Peng Pai.
The next commenter responded: “Google is the biggest search engine in the world, but it can’t be accessed in some places.”
Google’s search engine is not the only service that Chinese citizens cannot access, after the California company withdraw in 2010 over censorship issues. Last December, access to Google’s popular email software, Gmail, was shut down entirely on the Chinese Internet. Tech website 9to5Google notes that the tech giant’s other products and services are “blocked almost completely,” citing the example of Android smartphone users being unable to download apps from Google Play store in China.
Chinese citizens have long been blocked from social media services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram; they also cannot access, without the use of circumvention technologies, news from from foreign media organizations like New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters, or the newspaper you’re reading.
