China tightens Internet access rules

On Monday, the official news agency of China, Xinhua, reported that the government is considering a draft law on the mandatory registration of all Internet users under real names. Collection and storage of personal information about subscribers will have to deal with providers. A year ago, the use of real names was made mandatory on the most popular Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo. This is done under the pretext of protecting users from spam, insults and fraud and "improving the quality of subscription."

A few weeks ago, Chinese providers began to block VPN connections, which were one of the most popular ways to bypass the Great Firewall. In China, it is also very difficult to use TOR - access to most nodes of the anonymizing network is blocked. It seems that the new general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, who was elected at the party’s congress on November 15, is not going to liberalize the country's information policy. However, there were no special illusions on this score - Xi Jinping was unofficially considered the successor of the previous Secretary General Hu Jintao since the second half of the 2000s.

In July 2009, the Chinese authorities were going to make mandatory the use of the Green dam program on all personal computers, which filtered the Internet on the client side. This initiative was sharply criticized by public organizations and software and computer manufacturers, and the government backed off. Officially, the program was designed to protect children from dangerous content, such as pornography.