Google Drive blocked in China hours after its launch

Google's long-awaited cloud storage service Drive is already dead in China. Thanks to the country's Great Firewall, Google's service never actually stood a chance considering the past relationship between the Chinese government and Google.

The Chinese government is doing to Drive what they did to Dropbox and other Western cloud services: blocking them so local (and sometimes low-quality) services dominate the scene. The case here is that Chinese's own Google (Baidu) has launched its own cloud service.

Wangpan, Baidu's cloud storage service, is not unlimited like Google's Drive. Wangpan currently has a limited number of daily registrations at 5,000 users, but unlike Drive, its basic free plan starts with five times more storage space than the Google service.

With Wangpan being the only active cloud service in China, it is obvious that this local company will also be market leader there. But like what has happened to Facebook, Twitter and even mobile apps such as Instagram, clone alternatives will soon start popping out for cloud services as well.

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