China tightens its grip on the internet

The Chinese government’s powerful and organised internet censorship drive, euphemistically described as a clean-up designed to protect the citizenry from unacceptable content, is to focus on internet service providers, virtual private network services, internet data centers (IDC), and content delivery networks (CDN) companies, according to an announcement at the weekend by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The advisory revealed that the current drive will run through to the end of March 2018, and that online gambling and other inappropriate or unacceptable content must be blocked because:

““China’s internet connection service market … has signs of disordered development that require urgent regulation and governance.”

Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are all ordered blocked as unacceptable by the government..