The rigorous new Chinese cybersecurity laws which we wrote about last November took effect today. They’re designed to give China’s central government more..
The rigorous new Chinese cybersecurity laws which we wrote about last November took effect today.
They’ re designed to give China’s central government more direct control over the operations of internet-based companies operating in the country.
As we wrote last November:
The official word from Beijing’s state news agency, Xinhua, is that the law is an attempt to battle increasing threats from cyber-terrorism and hacking.
But it will also have a chilling effect on foreign businesses looking to grab a foothold in the world’s most populous country.
Foreign companies have argued for more clarity and more time to implement the controls that the government want put in place, but so far China’s internet regulator, The Cyberspace Administration of China, has only relented on pushing back the date for laws relating to the cross-border flow of information.
According to a report in The New York Times, those rules won’ t be implemented until 2018.
China does have legitimate security concerns. Thanks to lax intellectual property laws and rampant software piracy, the country was especially vulnerable to the WannaCry attacks from earlier in the month.
The South China Morning Post reported that over 30,000 institutions, including some major universities, had systems that were infected with the malware.
But critics of the legislation say that it does far more than secure the internet, it wraps China’s already firmly held Internet even more tightly in the government’s embrace.
As we wrote back in November:
