The most insidious part of this is I've never been sure if use of the site was being discouraged by the powers that be or if a more mundane, sensible explanation existed. It could be the authorities effectively censoring, it could be Chinese internet companies wanting Western competitors to have a reputation for being slow and unreliable, it could just be mundane technicalities like not bothering with peerage agreements for economic reasons, or it could be an alignment of interests between all of the above. I think not knowing who or what to blame, or even if there is a problem other than your personal connection, is the point. "My connection to certain sites seems inconveniently slow and maybe the government is doing it" is just way less sharp than "the government won't let me see this and likely has something to hide."
As counter-intuitive as it is, throttling without blocking is a more effective form of information control than blatantly blocking. The flow of information, like the flow of a river, cannot be stopped but it can be diverted and otherwise engineered.
There is certainly a push to use websites and infrastructure hosted in China. As it's no surprise a number of non-China popular websites don't even resolve properly from a DNS perspective there. So for most of the population the sites just don't exist.
> As counter-intuitive as it is, throttling without blocking is a more effective form of information control than blatantly blocking.
This is equally true for removing problematic users from a site. Outright banning them might anger them to the point of becoming a bigger nuisance, but throttling them (without their knowledge) is more likely to just bore them into targeting another service.
I know I've seen others here talk about this technique too, but I'm blanking on specific examples.
> A slowbanned user has delays forcibly introduced into every page they visit. From their perspective, your site has just gotten terribly, horribly slow. And stays that way. They can hardly disrupt the community when they're struggling to get web pages to load. There's also science behind this one, because per research from Google and Amazon, every page load delay directly reduces participation. Get slow enough, for long enough, and a slowbanned user is likely to seek out greener and speedier pastures elsewhere on the internet.
>Chinese internet companies wanting Western competitors to have a reputation for being slow and unreliable
Someone from US chamber of commerce Shanghai mentioned one of the disadvantages of expats working in China is slower workflow due to dependence on throttled western internet. Foreign companies are already structurally slow compare to domestic companies, frequently having to negotiate management structures between different time zones and generally less agile due to having more bureaucratic layers. It's an assymetric problem for Chinese companies abroad, much less western expats have mandarin fluency compared to Chinese expats who tend to be multilingual. Sometimes English as modern lingua franca backfires. Similarly, many Chinese sites are banned or throttled from access when you live in the west, Chinese diaspora hilariously depend VPN to access many Chinese websites while abroad. One would think the Chinese government would want to make it less hard to stay connected with the diaspora, but it's probably weighted against risk of foreign influence.
The only Chinese sites I know of that are blocked abroad are the ones that are distributing TV shows and other media without paying for the IP. I don't really think of those as the same thing, but if I were to put on my contrarian hat I suppose I would say there is no such thing as a priori illegitimate content which is universally accepted as ok to block. It is legitimate to block things which break the law, and the stuff which is blocked in either country breaks the laws of the respective regions.
Taking my hat off, I think this is a false equivalence. Every country, nay every civilization ever, has laws against stealing. Theft is universally acknowledged as an illegitimate activity.
Chinese streaming sites like Bilibili that block non-Chinese users from watching certain shows are probably paying for the IP, but only have a license for China, so they need to block everyone else.
You seem to be thinking about foreign governments blocking Chinese sites, but that's pretty insignificant compared to Chinese sites blocking foreign IPs from accessing them.
In fact this does not have to be intentional. Transit through other network cost money and Chinese ISPs rarely enter into peering aggrements with other ISPs because there is relatively little inbound traffic from abroad (notwithstanding a lot of lot of outbound ddos traffic, but I digress). Hence the situation is that even without any overt political motive, it is in the ISP's financial interest to throttle connections to anywhere outside their own infrastructure. Until a few years ago it's not common for Chinese datacenters to rent several drops each connected to a different ISP because interconnection between them is very limited.
There are three main carriers into China. China Telecom (CT), China Unicom (CU) and China Mobile (CM). Each one of them runs their intl connectivity hot during peak hours (they buy from a number of other carriers): in both directions and DDoS is part of that. They're slow to upgrade and when they do it fills up fast. That said, the China GFW runs even hotter. There are several GFW complexes in China that the govt runs and each carrier has to run circuits thru them and give access to the govt to login and config mode to the routers that surround the GFW middle boxes (which are Huawei or ZTE boxes). The govt steer specific IP prefixes/subnets to diff fws due to the fact that they can't store all the rules on every box within that layer. The GFW is the biggest bottleneck as the govt upgrades them maybe twice a year. I've seen it run hot for 16+ hours a day in certain cities.
This is quite true. About a decade ago GFW was a simple IDS that occasionally sent RST packets down the pipes. Nowadays it's much more complicated. I've witnessed the GFW upgrade in process several times in which they default to drop every cross border connection over port 80 but allow everything else through, then gradually going back to normal one route at a time.
However I'm not sure if the GFW is the blame for every case of passive throttling. Certain provinces have it better than others and there is no obvious pattern, especially CMCC which constantly have issues connecting to domestic services, but otherwise has very little throttling once you know how to get past the GFW. The same cannot be said for other providers which throttles home users extra hard so their capacity can be sold to business customers.
The RST cannons still exist and they usually offload that in the domestic China networks to take the load off the GFW. The operators have to pay for them, though :(
As for the GFWs tactics they've certainly expanded things into jacking with TLS in addition to a few other things.
Nice to meet another person who struggles with China and knows what they're talking about and doesn't spread fud like most of the people I deal with on a regular basis.
As counter-intuitive as it is, throttling without blocking is a more effective form of information control than blatantly blocking. The flow of information, like the flow of a river, cannot be stopped but it can be diverted and otherwise engineered.