Matt's Shanghai

No more phone calls...

What a wonderful Thanksgiving Day find:

The Chinese government has made it illegal to use Skype to make international calls. This is really bad news for me since this is the only real way that I can call the United States. If I have called you since I've been here, then you've talked to me on Skype. Phone cards are EXTREMELY expensive and takes two phone cards just to make a call, which means dialing 58 numbers (yes, I counted) before actually dialing the number, while using Skype to call the US over the internet only costs two cents a minute. Several articles site the government's lack of control over international phone calls when they're made over the internet. Also, they're really concerned that none of their 6 state-owned phone companies will start to loose profits, since none of them have mastered the VoIP technology that Skype uses. They want to be certain no outsider makes any money off of the Chinese... the Chinese government has to be making the money.

They will start putting blocks on the use of Skype in Beijing and Shanghai with the start of the new year. Even more ironic, the group that created the blocking software is an United States company, Verso Technologies, Inc. of Atlanta.

I know most of you couldn't care less if I can't use this program on my computer in China, but it severely restricts me from communicating to the United States. Of course China has to make this experience just a little harder. They already block access to a lot of US websites, you can't read many blogs from outside of China because it lets in free thought, something unheard of here. It's so disappointed to see more restrictions like this happening here when so many great improvements are being made to bring in the freedoms of the rest of the world.

posted by Matt Dull @ 2:47 PM