

However, for people living in China, VPN plays a greater role. For others, it’s a safe way of downloading torrents. Generally, VPN is just a tool to bypass country specific restrictions put out by famous streaming services like Netflix. Things are expected to become even more restricted as the latest report from Bloomberg states that the Chinese Government has ordered the three main state owned carriers in the country, namely China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom to block all personal VPNs by February 1, 2018. But do you know it has one of the most censored internet regimes? Recently, the country seems to be busy strengthening its censorship hold.

They also can’t tell Chinese censors “no”.China is home to some of the biggest tech companies in the world. Domestic companies such as Baidu and Tencent offer search, microblogging, messaging, and other alternatives to the most popular web services. Now, the growth of its own technology sector has given it a sort of parallel internet that can be controlled from within. China’s government has been resistant to the explosion of the internet from the beginning, but it made certain allowances knowing that completely blocking the internet wasn’t an option in the modern world. Reached for comment, a WhatsApp spokesperson told Gizmodo, “We are not providing a comment on this topic.”īut it isn’t just Facebook that has problems with China - major Western technology companies such as Google and Twitter are also shut out of the country. China is one of the few markets left to be tapped, but authorities have consistently resisted Mark Zuckerberg’s appeals. After hitting two billion users, it’s also running out of the potential for growth. Facebook warned investors last week during an earnings call that it’s running out of space to insert ads while still maintaining an acceptable user experience.
