The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has for a week of its network conference hotels in Beijing, the Shangri-La, taken over from there and delivers the unfiltered access to the global network. The IETF had this "sovereign power" to a condition for their first meeting friendly filter made in China. Outside the conference-island ", the participants themselves provide unrestricted access, such as via VPN, or they can not reach the IETF side part.

Although the IETF main problems and anywhere, who, however, the agenda and the materials studied the Beijing IETF effort in vain. The pages are usually accessible via HTTP, because sites such as paypal.com or cia.gov Beijing in functioned normally, this was the cause of access problems as excluded. With the closure of services such as Facebook or YouTube suspected a participant in the IETF but also economic motives for the ban "This benefits the Chinese competitors." On the other hand, many related to China according to past or present political climate reporting has outside its "great firewall" has kept in, such as the BBC, currently accessible.

Therefore, ask the IETF developers, why just the documentation of the development of standards for the Internet should be blocked. Especially as a senior representative of the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), the importance of the IETF's visit to Beijing this week also held in US-China Internet Industry Conference (UCII) stressed.

"I suppose that's just one of many errors that comes with it a complex filter system," said one of IETF participants, including not to be named. China is not just different techniques for blocking such as DNS blocking and blocking IP address ranges, but also the ability of the authorities, providers may ask again and again to block "harmful" content. This can quickly lead to "over blocking". Political background suggests neither foreign nor Chinese IETF developers.