China is currently blocking the sites of Virtual Private Network providers in order to discourage its citizens from availing of their services, CIO reported. The Chinese government is alarmed by the growing number of local internet users who are using VPN.
VPN service fees can range from $6 to $10 USD a month although some sites offer free VPN services.
Chinese VPN users are able to bypass their Government's censorship control over the internet wherein users are able to access sites, such as YouTube or Facebook, that are blocked in China.
SaferVPN spokesman Amit Bareket said that even with increasing government Internet censorship, their VPN services in China continues to flourish. He claims that their Chinese VPN user base has a daily increase of at least 300.
Director Ken Wu from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced that the Chinese government will make sure that the internet censorship controls are upgraded in order to keep up with the changing technology.
Despite the effort of Chinese censors to block sites that offer VPN services, it is hardly making a dent on the VPN industry, PC World reported. Bareket adds that while his company has a few thousand Chinese users, there are other VPN service providers that have more than 100,000 local internet users.
Initially, most VPN users in China are either foreigners or local business firms. The growing interest in popular network sites such as YouTube and Facebook has enticed many local Chinese to avail of VPN services.
The Chinese censors started its campaign against VPN providers when Hongkong pro-democracy protest images and videos were reaching the Chinese mainland via internet. The government even blocked access to Instagram in order to stop such images from circulating; however, VPN users were not affected by the block.
Bareket claims that even if the Chinese censors block a VPN domain, they can easily set up another one.