Feedburner Feeds Blocked by China?

Posted on August 6, 2006

Steve Rubel is discussing a post by William Long that says Feedburner feeds are being blocked by China. Blocking Feedburner feeds would result in blocking a huge number of blogs and sites.

FeedBurner, which powers hundreds of thousands of blog, podcast and mainstream news feeds (including this one), is apparently being blocked by Chinese authorities. Here is a Yoda-esque loose English language translation of William Long's original post. William even used a proxy server to verify that the issue is with the Chinese, not FeedBurner. His subscriber count dropped from over a thousand readers to zero overnight.

Sometimes a feed can remain visible during a blockade if it using a third-party RSS tool like Feedburner. However, if censoring countries are going to start blocking Feedburner as well as blogging tools like Typead and Blogger.com then the third-party tool won't be any help. Government's can block a domain like Blogspot.com, Typepad.com or Feedburner.com which results in a block of all the blogs and feeds using that domain. We recently witnessed this during India's blog block following the Mumbai bombings on 7-11 when typepad.com, blogspot.com and geocities URLs were blocked.

A couple comments on Steve Rubel's post suggest that the blocking may have been a temporary glitch and not necessarily an intentional censorship move by the Chinese government.