Skype to be banned in China

By siliconindia   |   Friday, 31 December 2010, 15:03 IST
Printer Print Email Email
Bangalore: Skype may be soon banned in China, leaving it to suffer the same fate of other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, clued People's Daily, the government's official newspaper. Only China Telecom and China Unicom will be allowed to provide Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services to customers in the future. According to Gregg Keizer of Computer World, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), which published the ruling earlier this month, has not set a timetable for implementing the new VoIP restrictions. While China Telecom is the largest land-line telephone company in the country, China Unicom is the nation's second-largest 3G mobile carrier and both are state controlled. Since 2007, Skype has partnered with Chinese mobile Internet carrier TOM Online to offer a Chinese-language version of its client software. The joint TOM-Skype site was still available Thursday to users outside of China. However, Skype declined to comment on whether the firm's service would be blocked in the future, but said that TOM Online remained available.