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Chinese Going Off The Official Telco System To Call Taiwan
from the time-for-the-great-voice-firewall dept
Paul Kedrosky points us to the news that, for the first time in 11 years, the "official" volume of phone calls from China to Taiwan has dropped rather significantly. Both the Digitimes report and Kedrosky suspect (reasonably) that this shows how many Chinese are jumping to use services like Skype to make these calls. Skype has long had a popular following in China, so this shouldn't be a huge surprise -- but it does make you wonder if the Chinese government will follow the path of various countries like Bangladesh, Belarus, Namibia and Jordan in banning Skype. We've already seen some experiments in China with blocking or banning certain types of calls. If the government feels that too many people are using these services, don't be surprised to see a wider ban enacted.
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As One Closed System To Another...
Even better, why not ask Skype themselves to block those calls, as a concession to be allowed to continue doing business in China? Skype is a proprietary, centralized system, it should be able to do something like this.
Open, standards-based VoIP, anybody?
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Re: As One Closed System To Another...
Why even bother blocking them? If Google bent over and greased up for the Chinese secret police rather than pull out of the country, I can't see Skype arguing with allowing wire-tapping on its system.
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