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Reported by Steven Millward, who writes for Penn-olson, Taobao.com, which is a part of Chinese eCommerce Company Alibaba Group has asked merchants to stop selling services that help netizens in China to bypass and circumvent Great Firewall of China.
China has banned all world’s top social networking and news websites including Facebook.com, Twitter.com, YouTube.com, Google Plus and pages of various newspapers including Economist, New York Times , WSJ and several others. In addition, China practices extreme internet censorship and filtering with a notorious firewall being built, most commonly known as Great Firewall of China.
Netizens in China use circumvention tools like Virtual Private Networks, Proxies and IP Changing Software to bypass the local censorship and surf the internet like the rest of us use and surf outside China. However, Chinese authorities have taken several actions against these circumvention tools. Proxies are completely blocked in China and VPN have also been compromised as China first blocked most commonly used VPN Protocols; PPTP and L2TP, while, later on it went on to blocking several VPN Services and DNS poisoning their domain names in order to prevent Chinese internet users from using these circumvention tools.
Using VPN has been a cat and mouse game in China. On one hand Great Firewall authorities take all the measures to block VPN in China, whereas, on the other hand,VPN Service providers also take different measures to maintain their services in China. However, the end user is suffering a lot in the process. VPN users have reported instability in different VPN connections, whereas, users in some Chinese locations have reported zero stability and accessibility with VPN.
Alibaba’s Taobao.com being one of the biggest eCommerce platform provider in China with more than 7 million active merchants has now asked all of his merchants selling circumvention tools, to discontinue selling these services, otherwise their merchant accounts will be suspended.
Vice President of Alibaba Group John Spelich said that the company was on routine check of what their merchants are selling. Referring to selling circumvention tools he said, “A decision was taken that this was a business that we probably should not be in, so we exited”.
Alibaba is constantly emphasizing the fact that they have not been asked by anyone to discontinue selling VPN services and that it is their business decision to discontinue selling it through all merchants.
This comes out as another blow to our Chinese friends as all the VPN Services using Alibaba and Taobao.com as their eCommerce platform, will soon be discontinuing VPN Services. This will further limit the already very limited VPN Choices available to Chinese Netizens.
We will keep you updated on internet situation in China. You follow our VPN and China categories for all updates.
You can also,
- Follow our Dedicated Category, ‘VPN & China’. You will get all the updates on VPN and China from this category.
- Follow our Top 10 Ranking of Best VPN for China. It is also regularly updated to keep our friends up to date with the status of VPN Services that we recommend to our Chinese Visitors.
- Follow our post on Banned VPN website status in China for updates as well.
You can also use our Chinese Firewall Test, which will help you out on finding out whether a particular website is being DNS poisoned in China or not.
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You can also see here the all time Top 10 VPN Providers list.
Wish you a Happy and Private Internet Life !!
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