Why Is Dropbox Back On the Chinese Market? 46
Nerval's Lobster writes "Dropbox has renewed access to the Chinese market for the first time in four years. But why? The Chinese government first blocked access to Dropbox in 2010, most likely to prevent people within China from sharing data via the cloud. Now Dropbox is back online in China, albeit at slower speeds. Despite repeated queries from Slashdot, however, Dropbox has declined to comment on why China may have dropped the in-country restrictions to its services. "We still have nothing to share," the company responded after the third email. Dropbox isn't the only foreign cloud service available on the Chinese market (although Google Drive remains blocked): in late 2013, Amazon announced it would open an Amazon Web Services (AWS) region in the country; at the time, the Amazon Web Services Blog alluded to the "legal and regulatory requirements" that this new AWS region will obey. So questions remain: Did Dropbox know it would regain entry to the Chinese market? If so, did it need to agree to certain conditions before the Chinese government would "flip the switch," as it were?"
Really? (Score:2, Informative)
I'm in Guangzhou right now using Guangzhou Telecom (a region "branch" of China Telecom) with OpenNIC DNS and I can't access dropbox.com (CONNECTION_RESET, which is a typical GFW sign).
It's been working on and off for about a month (Score:2, Informative)
Near the end of January I noticed that I didn't have to connect to my VPN for my home computer Dropbox to sync. But it's on and off. When it's on, the speed isn't throttled; I get the same slow speed I get to any US server (although my 50 Mb/s connection to APA is generally better than anything I get in the USA).
At work, of course, we have a privileged connection to the outside world, because we're one of the largest non-Chinese companies in the world, and we give a lot of money to China.