Chinese government is moving towards blocking all Virtual Private Networks (VPN’s) in the country by next year, Bloomberg has revealed today, this would be a significant crackdown on civilian’s access to worldwide web.
Bloomberg has cited various sources which reports that Chinese government has ordered state-owned telecoms to start blocking VPN’s by the start of February. SCMP reported that Ministry of Industry and Information Technology China has announced that this is a part of cleanup process, further VPN’s services would require a special approval by the government in order to continue their services.
This could be a big blow not only to Chinese users but also tech companies globally, China is the most populous country in the world accounts for 18.8% of world population. Estimated number of Chinese Facebook users in 2017 is 54.39 million. Estimated number of Twitter users according to techcrunch was 10 million back in 2016. Chinese internet users use VPN’s to access the websites including News, Social networks and others. As China is planning to build a “Great Firewall” which similitudes “Great Wall of China” which was built to protect Chinese from the invasions of Eurasian Steppe.
It cannot be comprehended yet, to what extent this protection would affect various organizations globally, whether this protection would only block the News, Social sites or it would spread across other foreign corporations.
“If they’re as interested in security and stability as they say they are, then they should leave VPNs accessible for entire country,” Kaiser Kuo, former head of international communications at Baidu, responded in a post on Facebook. He further said, “The number of people using them in China is really small, but really vocal — and I don’t think they’ll just take this lying down. It will reflect very badly on the party. Dark days ahead.”
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