Great Firewall

The Great Firewall (GFW), nicknamed the Green Dam by Chinese netizens, is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically. Its role in the Internet censorship law in mainland China is to block access to selected foreign websites and to slow down cross-border internet traffic. The effect includes: limiting access to foreign information sources, blocking foreign internet tools (e.g. Google search, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and others) and mobile apps, and requiring foreign companies to adapt to domestic regulations. Besides censorship, the Great Firewall has also influenced the development of China's internal internet economy by nurturing domestic companies and reducing the effectiveness of products from foreign internet companies.

Why It's Not a "Great" Firewall

 * 1) Much like Article 13 and SOPA, they use block methods such as IP ranges, DNS spoofing, URLs bans, and more.
 * 2) Due to "political sensitivity", the great firewall censors various keywords. Some examples include:
 * 3) Keywords related to minorities in China, such as "Dalai Lama" and "Xinjiang Reeducation Camp".
 * 4) Keywords related to negative political events in China, such as "Cultural Revolution" and "Tiananmen Square".
 * 5) Keywords related to the political status of the Republic of China (Taiwan), "Taiwan is a country", "Taiwanese independence" and etc.
 * 6) The government has blocked many sites. The following list contains major examples:
 * 7) Search engines, including Google, DuckDuckGo and StartPage.
 * 8) Encyclopedias, including Wikipedia.
 * 9) News sites: BBC, The Guardian, The Washington Post, South China Morning Post, Al Jazeera English, Tibet Post.
 * 10) The Japanese version of Amazon.
 * 11) Social networking websites from the west including Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
 * 12) Nintendo's official site.
 * 13) Internet archiving websites, including Wayback Machine.
 * 14) The government banned so many celebrities that entered from China such as Harrison Ford, PewDiePie, Miley Cyrus, etc.
 * 15) They will detect and track people using VPNs or Tor and target them by law, making it literally impossible to access the internet freely without facing legal trouble.

Trivia

 * It is possible to bypass the Great Firewall with VPNs or Tor. The government, however, has developed techniques to detect and track people using VPNs or Tor, criminalized the practice, citing "connecting to the Internet with illegal tunnel".