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China makes Skype illegal - Telegraph
China has made Skype illegal, according to state-run media, as the country continues to shut itself off from the rest of the world.
Malcolm Moore in Shanghai 12:36PM GMT 30 Dec 2010
All internet phone calls will be banned apart from those made over two state-owned networks, China Unicom and China Telecom.
[This] is expected to make services like Skype unavailable in the country, reported the Peoples Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist party.
Websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are already blocked in China and Google closed down its Chinese servers last year after heavy government pressure.
Yesterday (Thurs), Wang Chen, the deputy head of the Chinese Propaganda department, boasted that By November, [...] 350 million piece of harmful information, including text, pictures and videos, had been deleted [from the Chinese internet].
Some Chinese users of Twitter, the micro-blogging website, claimed they could already no longer download Skype, but the service appeared to be working normally in Shanghai.
China is now the worlds largest market for internet phone calls, which are far cheaper than land-line calls and are now cutting into the market of Chinas state telecommunications giants.
Since September 2007, Skype users in China have had to use a service provided jointly by Skype and TOM, a Hong Kong-based company.
The service has been widely criticised for monitoring messages on the network, especially those which mentioned sensitive subjects such as Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement, and Tibet.
Yesterday the Chinese ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which issues licenses to telecommunication companies, declined to comment on when the regulations would take effect. SkypeBJ, the companys Beijing partner, declined to comment on the ban and Skype itself did not respond to requests for a statement.
According to the new regulations, phone calls from computers to land lines on Skype will be banned, but it may still be legal to make calls from computers to other computers.
However, experts said the rules would be difficult, if not impossible, to enforce, since Chinese internet users could simply download versions of Skype or other internet phone call programs from websites outside China.
It is very unlikely that they will manage to shut Skype down, said Professor Kan Kaili at Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications.
Skype is the market leader, but there is also MSN and Gmail Talk. The children of Chinese government officials, who are studying abroad, use these services to call home, so I do not think anyone is going to cut the lines. Even if they take a strict approach, such as getting local operators to block the broadband services of people who use Skype, people will still find a way around it, he added.
China has made Skype illegal, according to state-run media, as the country continues to shut itself off from the rest of the world.
Malcolm Moore in Shanghai 12:36PM GMT 30 Dec 2010
All internet phone calls will be banned apart from those made over two state-owned networks, China Unicom and China Telecom.
[This] is expected to make services like Skype unavailable in the country, reported the Peoples Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist party.
Websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are already blocked in China and Google closed down its Chinese servers last year after heavy government pressure.
Yesterday (Thurs), Wang Chen, the deputy head of the Chinese Propaganda department, boasted that By November, [...] 350 million piece of harmful information, including text, pictures and videos, had been deleted [from the Chinese internet].
Some Chinese users of Twitter, the micro-blogging website, claimed they could already no longer download Skype, but the service appeared to be working normally in Shanghai.
China is now the worlds largest market for internet phone calls, which are far cheaper than land-line calls and are now cutting into the market of Chinas state telecommunications giants.
Since September 2007, Skype users in China have had to use a service provided jointly by Skype and TOM, a Hong Kong-based company.
The service has been widely criticised for monitoring messages on the network, especially those which mentioned sensitive subjects such as Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement, and Tibet.
Yesterday the Chinese ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which issues licenses to telecommunication companies, declined to comment on when the regulations would take effect. SkypeBJ, the companys Beijing partner, declined to comment on the ban and Skype itself did not respond to requests for a statement.
According to the new regulations, phone calls from computers to land lines on Skype will be banned, but it may still be legal to make calls from computers to other computers.
However, experts said the rules would be difficult, if not impossible, to enforce, since Chinese internet users could simply download versions of Skype or other internet phone call programs from websites outside China.
It is very unlikely that they will manage to shut Skype down, said Professor Kan Kaili at Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications.
Skype is the market leader, but there is also MSN and Gmail Talk. The children of Chinese government officials, who are studying abroad, use these services to call home, so I do not think anyone is going to cut the lines. Even if they take a strict approach, such as getting local operators to block the broadband services of people who use Skype, people will still find a way around it, he added.
