Zoom is one of those few companies that have benefited the most from the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, they are experiencing growing pains faster than they anticipated, and that means a lof of compliance on their end.
Today, the company has announced that they are going to block participants based on geography.
This is due to a case that involved the Chinese government making demands to the American companies to terminate large meetings that were publicized on social media.
Zoom says in May and early June, the Chinese government notified them about 4 large public June 4th commemoration meetings on Zooms. They told Zoom that this activity was illegal in China and demanded that Zoom terminate the meetings and host accounts.
Two of the meetings had a “significant number of mainland China participants. Zoom suspended the host accounts in Hong Kong and two in the US and have since reinstated these host accounts. They said that they shut down these meetings instead of blocking participants since they did not have the capability to block participants per country.
This is why they announced that over the next several days, they will develop technology that will enable them to remove or block the participant based on geography. This would enable them to comply with requests from local authorities when they determine activity on their platform is illegal within their borders.
This is a pretty huge policy change, which means if fully implemented in the future and governments catch up with the law, they would block you from participating in a meeting.
