CHINESE BAN ON VPNS

Free trade for China, but no free Internet

THE CHINESE MINISTRY of Industry and Information has announced the start of a 14-month campaign to target the use of VPNs in China to “clean up” the Internet, and encourage the “healthy” development of the industry. Running a VPN business inside China will now require a state license, and presumably close co-operation with the authorities. President Xi Jinping recently delivered a speech to the World Economic Forum on the benefits of opening up world trade and world borders. The irony is palpable.

Details on the new rules are a little vague, but the clear targets are businesses inside China who provide VPNs for its citizens. The firewall that surrounds China has also started blocking VPN sites. Large corporations are unaffected so far. VPNs are popular in China to access otherwise blocked sites, such as Google and YouTube, and evade censorship on specific subjects, principally anything concerning dissatisfaction with the state.

The Internet arrived in China in 1994, and the state started to attempt to control it in 1998; a firewall for the entire nation followed in 2003. China’s efforts to control the Internet were initially greeted with much skepticism in the West. The Internet was seen as too porous and too distributed to be stopped. While it is still difficult to stop a determined individual, the state has proved remarkably effective at suppressing the curious. In China, you expect to be tracked, and self-censorship is natural.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, VPNs are free to use and popular, even if the authorities aren’t always keen on the uses they are put to. China has shown that it is possible to effectively control what it was once thought almost impossible to police. Let’s hope nobody else gets any ideas.