Mainland Blocks Gmail, Google Censored By 'Great Firewall Of China'.

Gmail, Google's (GOOGL) email service has been blocked by the Chinese government, according to reports that confirm the world wide web clampdown is targeted toward companies like Google, that have an edge over local competitors.

Despite repeated Internet clampdowns by the mainland government, Google's ad revenues have been doing in China. Gmail has known its presence around the world as th most widely email service in the world. But Gmail has been blocked since the Tiananmen Square Anniversary in June. And the Chinese government is censoring the World Wide Web more tightly after the Hong Kong democratic protests began at the end of 2014.

China has trailed tiger economies in Asia, but it still has a tendency to restrict Internet activities. 'The government's "Golden Shield Project," more commonly called the "Great Firewall," monitors citizens' Internet activity and blocks access to many Western Web sites and online services toptechnews.com."

Until a week ago, Gmail was accessed using third party apps. On Christmas Day, the traffic on Gmail flattened out.GreatFire.org, an anti-censorship group said that the Internet outage was due to the Government's 'Great Firewall of China,' which blocked "large numbers of IP addresses used by Gmail."

A spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman told Reuters, "she did not know anything about Gmail being blocked.".

Yahoo Finance senior columnist Michael Santoli said in a Yahoo Finance report, "Chinese users normally use SMTP and the IMAP to access their Gmail, but it was not working."

Facebook, Twitter and The New York Times have all had bans in the past.