Skype has just become illegal in China. Every single Internet phone call is going to be banned except those that are made thanks to the services of China Telecom and China Unicom, which are state owned networks.
Highly popular sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are already blocked in the country, even Google had to close its Chinese server due to government pressure.
Wang Chen declared that over “350 million pieces of harmful information” were deleted from the Internet. This includes videos, pictures and text.
Talking about Skype, some Chinese Twitter users claimed that Skype was no longer available for download. There have been reports though that calls were functioning fine in Shanghai.
At the moment, China stands out as the largest internet phone call market. This is mainly because of the fact that such calls are cheaper than regular land-line calls. The problem was that the telecommunications giants in China were suffering because of this.
Since 2007, Chinese Skype users were forced to use the services of a joint service offered by TOM and Skype. Criticism quickly appeared as the service was suspected of monitoring network messages that talked about “sensitive” subjects.
Skype has not released any comments so far.
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