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Comment by mstaoru | Hacker News Reader

When you apply for ICP beian license at Aliyun (Alibaba's cloud), you either choose "I use Aliyun" and give them the server ID, or you choose "I use another server" and two additional fields appear: your server log in, your server password.

You need ICP license if you want to integrate any kind of service. Wechat, Alipay, other payment systems, SMS notifications etc, everything needs the ICP.

I guess AWS China also had to give up access to all servers to govt. And given the govt "professionalism" (check the China's Ministry of Information website), that's not the kind of access I'd like to give away.

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Usually not having the ICP also means your site is dog slow and prone to being blocked at any moment.

Of course if your site is actually needed enough this rule kind of gets ignored. See: GitHub. They probably don't have an ICP license or plans to get one and yet it works really well in China (not even joking)

I remember Github has been blocked in the past . See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub#China

Yeah, and then they realized that most tech companies rely on it.

The original block was way too wide, now they just block gist which is obviously used by dissidents to spread unlawful propaganda. The whole family of pastebin and pastebin-like websites is blocked for the same reason.

And URL shorteners. Almost impossible to find one that isn't blocked

If you are ready for that, is it possible for a foreign company to obtain an ICP license and thus operate in China?

AFAIK it is possible now to get the ICP, but to integrate Wechat / Alipay or any other meaningful service you need a Chinese legal entity. A foreign company can register WFOE which is a Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise, you do not need any Chinese partners or anything, but might be costly to set up and in paid-up capital depending on the industry. E.g. for a fashion brand I know of, they asked to have ¥10 million ($1.5 million) to be deposited within 1 year.

Thanks!

What password? SSH password? What if you use SSH keys? None of my AWS instances have passwords and even in the days when I had EC2 instances in Beijing a couple years ago there were no passwords to them. (I wasn't hosting a public-facing service so no ICP was necessary. But still, any non-idiotic sysadmin won't be having password authentication to all their servers.)

Then you don't get the license. I have an app built on top of Zappa, using Lambda + API Gateway, I don't even have an IP address! :)

Anyway, for NOW, the possible workaround, as I've heard, shall we say, is to use a temporary server, get the ICP and then change your DNS to point to the real server. For NOW they don't track it, but you need to re-apply every 12-24 months (rinse & repeat). However, it gives them every ground to shut your service down without any warning.

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