Local Japanese domains were down for 30 hours in China’s heavily guarded cyberspace last weekend. Some suggested that it could have been an error but there have been accusations of increased censorship and the strengthening of the “great firewall”.
According to The Next Web, domains ending with “co.jp” were blocked from the country’s 500 million Web users. Only sites with the top-level domain “co.jp” were down, though, while other Japanese websites using “.com” or “.jp” remained online.
This could impact Japan’s vast market in Asia as Japanese business websites remained unaccessible for over a day. Some companies, fortunately for them, use “.cn” domain names for their business operation in China and were not affected.
The Chinese government has been tightening its grip on the online community as comments about “sensitive” issues flooded microblogging sites. Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, received orders to implement fines for users who post critical comments. Aside from blocking Facebook and Twitter, certain keywords are also blocked from search engines.
