In what has been called "a networking error" by CIO.com, some Internet users in Chile and in the U.S. recently had their Internet requests routed through the Great Firewall of China — which redirected the users intending to visit popular social networking sites and other banned sites to Chinese servers.
The incident is reportedly the result of at least one ISP using a Chinese DNS root server, which delivered information intended for Chinese surfers — namely, only government approved media — with a long list of mainstream companies barred due to their content; which includes news, commentary and social networking tools, as well as porn.
Chilean DNS admin Mauricio Ereche was the first to report the issue, when he saw local requests for sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube being redirected to Chinese government run servers.
Similar instances were also reported in California.
The problem is that global ISPs making use of Chinese Internet services effectively hand control over their user's Internet experience, data and personal information, as well as psychographic information based upon search queries and page requests, straight to the Chinese government and its intelligence agencies — which take a very dim view of "freedom of speech."
While this is the first public report of such an issue, it is apparently by no means the first occurrence, with researchers actively studying the problem for at least the past year.