Less than two years after Dropbox was first launched, China blocked the service in 2010. Tech In Asia reported that China has today unblocked the cloud storage service according to VentureBeat.
The availability of the service was first noticed by Tech In Asia the previous week. The news site has also verified that the file-sharing and cloud-syncing features of Dropbox are now available across China. However, its rival Google Drive is still blocked, the report detailed.
Inspite of its renewed accessibility, the California-based company will most likely not draw in a large group of users. This is because of China's extremely slow connection to international servers, causing the use of foreign web services to be a nuisance. In addition, local rivals offer more attractive packages. Chinese cloud storage service Tencent's free storage offer is at 10TB, compared to Dropbox's free storage of only 2GB, the report explained.
The exact reason why Dropbox was originally blocked remains unclear, and why it was unblocked now is also not clear. Some people think that the Chinese government wanted to prevent its citizens from accessing or sharing politically sensitive files or information using Dropbox. The action could have also been made to surpass foreign competitors, the report speculated.
Dropbox is expected to go public this year. With China's over 40 million private enterprises, the country could prove to be an important market for the cloud storage firm, VentureBeat reported.
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