VoIP Now Technically Illegal In China

ironfrost writes "A recent ruling by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has declared that VoIP services are illegal, except for the ones operated by state-owned telecom operators China Telecom and China Unicom. According to the article, 'the decision is expected to make Skype, UUCall and other similar services unavailable in China,' and is widely seen as a way to protect the traditional telecom operators' profits. Here's a more in-depth story in Chinese (Google Translate version)."

Re:Wow...

[pclminion]

That's a very capitalistic way of viewing it... My first thought is that it makes it a lot easier for the Chinese government to be able to tap calls. It's easier to tap when you don't allow private infrastructure to exist.

Re:I love where I live

[commodore64_love]

>>>So what do people in China do for fun?

Sex?
I hear those Chinese ladies are, to quote a song, "Ladies in the street but a freak in the bed." You just have to make sure not to get pregnant more than once. :-|

Somebody else wrote:
>>>And despite doing things like this constantly, China is still the darling of all the so-called "free trade" advocates.

Kinda like Fascist Germany, Italy, and Spain were considered marvels by their contemporaries. They were the 1930s boom economies with private corporations under State control. A bit like China today.

Re:Wow...

[Grishnakh]

Yep, it's exactly like the USA. In the USA, there's two political parties, which hold all the political power in the country. One is named "Democrats", as if they have anything to do with democracy. The other is named "Republicans", even though they have nothing in common with republicanism. Instead, they are both actually fascists, who work for corporate interests and only stop to try to fool the voters now and then into making them think they're working for the people, such as by blaming all their corporate-friendly actions on the other party.

In China, there's only one political party, which holds all the political power in the country. It's named "Communists", though, just like the American parties, they don't have anything at all to do with communism. And again, they're fascists, working for corporate interests. However, unlike in America, their actions are helping much of the population through "trickle-down economics", simply because most of the population was so dirt-poor before than the improvements from the new sorta-free-market system seem like a giant leap ahead for them. In America, we're not at a place where trickle-down economics work (mainly because we don't have a gigantic population of dirt-poor serfs), so instead, we're regressing, and experiencing a fast-growing gap between the rich and the poor, with the middle class rapidly disappearing, making us a bigger Banana Republic than any South or Central American country ever was.