China’s Internet Underground Fights for Its Life

For years, thousands of virtual private networks (VPNs) have allowed people in China to circumvent restrictions on internet access and visit Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, and other sites blacklisted by the government. That’s changing. Chinese authorities say that starting on March 31 they’ll shut down or simply ban any providers of unauthorized VPN services and apps. Sunday Yokubaitis, president of VPN provider Golden Frog in Austin, says he has an idea of what the censors can do.

On a quiet day in January 2015, Yokubaitis says, his computer erupted with system alerts and emailed complaints from Chinese customers. Something was jamming Golden Frog’s popular VyprVPN service with targeted blocks of its server addresses, rendering it essentially unusable in China. “They blocked all of our servers at the same time,” he says. He calls it a random crackdown and says things have gotten worse since then.