With their never ending attempts to restrict the Internet audience to a handful of content, the Chinese government has come up with a refurbished, harder to circumvent censorship wall.
A recent upgrade made to the ‘Great Firewall of China’ has made the Internet filtering and censoring stricter, is the worst thing to have happened to the people needing Internet access as it is harder than ever to evade it.
Not only the nationals but the businessmen too are in a jam, as going through trivial sites is more difficult now. Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube and many more services like Gmail will not be easily accessible now. These services not only ensure a relationship and contact with friends but are important for business purposes too, but that probably isn’t the priority here.
There are at least 2 strong reasons as to why the government is pursuing this plan:-
- To throw away any material that is critical of the Communist Chinese government or any of it’s policies and
- To give way to local firms and sites and provide them supremacy over the usage of the Internet, and thus trying to restrict the “outside influences”.
There have been reports that the Chinese government officials are targeting VPNs that provide a way around their firewall. ‘Astrill’, a popular VPN used in China is a target which further makes things worse.
A senior official confirmed disruption of Astrill’s services, among others, and the disruptions will become more frequent.
While the Chinese government thinks of this as a “healthy development”, the critics have argued that this is disturbing the innovation that the general public is capable of and exposure to some of the most basic content on the Internet.
Strict Internet laws may not be the only headache for businesses in China as the government has issued new regulations according to which, tech firms will have to submit their source codes and give into audits as well.
Gmail service via third party apps had been banned in China a few days ago and this is just making things more difficult for the people who need Internet access and quality content. Reports from Chinese internet activists also claimed a similar ban on Microsoft’s Outlook service.
