China's 2012 real-name registration law for consumer-facing online services (including VPNs) is designed to enable censors to segment circumvention-related consumer VPN traffic from business VPN traffic — permitting selective blocking of consumer VPNs while leaving corporate VPNs operational. The GFW had already demonstrated protocol-level VPN blocking capability; registration provides the identifying information needed to apply that capability selectively rather than as a blunt instrument.
From 2013-robinson-collateral — Collateral Freedom: A Snapshot of Chinese Internet Users Circumventing Censorship
· §1 Introduction, §3 Collateral Freedom Matters
· 2013
· OpenITP
Implications
Circumvention tools structurally indistinguishable from corporate VPN traffic face lower near-term block risk in China; consider mimicking enterprise VPN protocol signatures and infrastructure deployment patterns.
Regulatory mechanisms such as licensing and real-name registration can substitute for or augment technical blocking — threat models must account for legal and policy attack vectors, not only DPI-based detection.