Since the following of this month there has been an increased pressure over the internet and web hosting in mainland China. There are two main aspects on the crackdown:
1-Web sites with illegal contents, i.e. adult contents/porn, political related, drugs and other subjects that are prohibited in China. Online forums and blogs are being shut down as well as scores of websites for mobile phones.
2-Websites operating without an ICP license. Sites hosted in China need to apply for an ICP license, now the authorities are enforcing that rule and shutting down sites or whole servers when found without the necessary licenses.
While this has happen before, this month a new method has been adopted by the regulators, which is to go directly to datacenters. Datacenters that are found to have a large number of illegal sites/sites without license are just shut down altogether. Earlier this month over 10 Shanghai Telecom datacenters were thus shut down, causing tens of thousands of websites, most of which legitimate or business related to go offline for over a week, causing outcry online among Chinese netizens. But it is not only Shanghai that is affected. All over the country websites and datacenters are being shut down or heavily regulated.
We will be posting more articles on this subject as we get more news on this.