Traveling to China and hoping to use a virtual private network (VPN) to circumvent the Great Firewall? New rules from the Chinese Cyberspace Administration are about to make that a lot harder, the South China Morning Post reported this week.
All VPN services in mainland China now need permission from the government to operate legally, according to the Post. Since the government is unlikely to approve VPNs that allow unfiltered Internet access, the decision is a time of reckoning for VPN companies based in China, which must now block sites or be shut down.
The new VPN rule is a companion to a broader series of online censorship measures that the Cyberspace Administration announced last week. They include requiring any company with a Web presence in China to register a ".cn" domain name. According to security company Golden Frog, the registration requirement means that even if a VPN found a way to circumvent the new rules, its customers still wouldn't be able to access blacklisted sites.
"The current method being used to block websites is blacklisting, or blocking and filtering of sites deemed unfit by the Chinese government," Golden Frog said in a blog post last week. "If this new domain registration approach is implemented, however, it means that a VPN would be useless—the website content wouldn't be allowed/exist in China to begin with, so circumventing a block wouldn't enable users to access it."
The crackdown is unsurprising, since getting around the firewall has historically been fairly easy. Many Western companies in China, including luxury hotels—have offered unrestricted Internet access to their employees and guests via VPNs. There are also many consumer VPN providers that optimize their products for the Chinese firewall, including Golden Frog's Vypr. A representative from the company told the Post that it is "currently working on ways around" the crackdown.
Of the top 1,000 websites as measured by Alexa, 171 are currently blocked in China, according to GreatFire.org. They include Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.