At face value, that was really fast. Yes, fast. The announcement that various entities that have been operating under Google and Google itself will be spun off and become subsidiaries of a new company is barely a few hours old. Yet the new company’s website is already the subject of the great firewall’s merciless blockade. abc.xyz is blocked in China and just like any Google product, it is not publicly accessible in that country.
China has a long history of restricting access to Google products’ sites so this move is hardly surprising. Just the timely manner in which the same was executed is baffling. But this wouldn’t be as surprising if China has simply blacklisted Google’s SSL certificate meaning that no matter the launch date, any site bearing the company’s SSL certificate will not be publicly accessible in China.
Source: GreatFire.org
