China Is Banning VPN Services - 1 Billion People Without Freedom

The entire world went crazy about net neutrality yet that’s not a big problem compared to what China is doing as China is banning VPN services. That’s huge. Sure, net neutrality might result in you having a slower connection to a certain website. It might also result in you having to pay to use a certain website. Unless you use a VPN service of course, if you use a service like ours, you will be encrypted. With us, somebody will have 2 to 256th power chance of hacking into what you are doing. U.S. government kind of security. But that’s the thing. You will be able to use a VPN service in the US to solve problems that net neutrality might bring. In China, from the start of February of 2018, you won’t be able to.

China Is Banning VPN Services, and It Isn’t a Joke

VPN services like ours provide people with freedom on the internet. You are encrypted. Nobody (not including you of course) can see what you are doing. You can also be virtually anywhere you desire. It doesn’t matter if it’s the government that tries to see what you are doing or whether it’s your internet provider. You are anonymous. A site can’t be blocked because nobody knows you are on it. If it’s blocked in that location, you just change the location of the server you are connected to. Net neutrality is not a problem in most cases if you have a VPN. Your internet provider wouldn’t be able to charge you for using Netflix because it decided to block it unless you pay a fee because Netflix is a competitor of your provider’s services as even if that was to happen, you have a VPN to protect you.

Unless the internet provider bans a certain VPN service. And that’s what’s about to happen in China. China is banning VPN services.

Now, thousands of websites, including the biggest websites in the world have been banned in China for years. They call it the Great Firewall of China. Great Wall of China, Great Firewall of China, get it?

This movement basically eliminated most of the internet from China. You should not expect to find any foreign sites or information in China. Facebook. Instagram. YouTube. Any major site, banned.

There Was One Way to Bypass It

While these sites have been banned for years, millions of people living in China were using virtual private networks to bypass these problems. A VPN service allowed people in China to access all of these banned sites. You wanted to access Facebook, you connected to one of our 56 server locations, and you could access Facebook, securely. China is banning VPN services, and this will no longer work from the 1st of February.

China is banning VPN services by instructing 3 major internet providers in China to block all of the VPN services available. The question is can they actually ban all of them. That, we will find out.

It’s Prison Kind of Serious

Wu Xiangyang was sentenced to prison for 5 years for running a VPN service in China. He is not the only example. If you get caught using a VPN in China, you will also deal with consequences.

And companies have to comply with China’s demands as China is vital for many businesses. Apple for instance. Apple had to remove all of the VPN services from the App Store. Imagine China banning production of iPhones in China if they didn’t.

We Are Worried About Freedom of the Chinese People

At PrivateVPN, we believe in the right to have the freedom to access information on the internet. China is taking that away from the people. Leaving space for the level of propaganda that happened 70 years ago but wouldn’t be possible today unless internet access was limited such as it is about to be in China.

“The secret to happiness is freedom... And the secret to freedom is courage.” -Thucydides

Everybody talked about net neutrality. Nobody talks about this.

Over 1 billion people will suffer because of this.

Written by Michael Smolski.