[yogenpro]

Another bad thing about GFW is that Chinese government can export the filtering infrastructure to other countries who also favor the idea of "cyberspace sovereignty". They might have been doing this already.

Also, VPNs are mostly used by academic institutions and corporations. Common netizens often use "Shadowsocks", a protocol that focuses on obfuscation rather than encryption, to make it more difficult for the Wall to recognize its pattern, hence more unlikely to be filtered. It has been working perfectly for 5+ years until recently some people were saying that their Shadowsocks traffic got recognized by the police, then ISP suspended their Internet, they had to visit the police station to sign a commitment of "never use unauthorized means to access Internet" to resume their Internet connection.

This could be "fake news" but still worrisome because if GFW will whitelist only registered VPN servers, and now that Shadowsocks is down, there will be no alternatives.

That said, this is only a concern of probably less than 1% of people. The others either don't know the existence of the Wall, or don't care about the world outside the Wall. In that sense, GFW is already a success.

[subliminalpanda]

From this link it looks like Russia is a customer already. [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/29/putin-china-in...

[fooker]

Yep, Pakistan has reportedly agreed to be a part of it in the name of CPEC.

[baybal2]

There is no such thing as a "whitelisted" VPN in China