China just made it a lot harder for Internet users in the country to bypass the so-called Great Firewall thanks to a new crackdown on unauthorized virtual private networks.

Yesterday, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced that it has launched a 14-month campaign to strengthen its control over the internet within the country, and it kicked things off by passing a law that requires VPN providers to be approved by the government. This has effectively made most VPNs illegal in China. In addition, the law also requires users to receive approval before they are allowed to use any VPN services.

“China’s internet connection service market … has signs of disordered development that requires urgent regulation and governance,” the ministry said, according to the South China Morning Post.

The Great Firewall of China is actually a series of firewalls and other security measures that prevent internet users from accessing a wide range of websites that the government deems inappropriate, including Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter and many others. Most foreign social networks are blocked in China because of the government’s fear that they can be used by dissidents for communications, as was the case when China blocked Facebook in 2009.

China also blocks a number of foreign news sites and search engines, particularly those that provide access to supposedly anti-government material such as information on the Tiananmen Square protest. According to the South China Morning Post, the Great Firewall blocks roughly 13.5 percent of all websites.

VPNs can allow users to bypass the Great Firewall entirely, enabling them to access the uncensored web without the Chinese government being able to easily monitor their activities. This made them popular with tech-savvy Internet users in China, many of whom use the services for fairly innocuous purposes, such as watching videos on YouTube or playing video games on foreign servers.

The Chinese ministry’s campaign is effective immediately, and the government says that it will run through March 31, 2018. In addition to the crackdown on VPNs, the campaign will also involve investigations of ISPs and other Internet-related businesses to ensure that they are complying with all of the government’s restrictions.

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